Samuel Fales Dunlap was born on July 23, 1825, to a wealthy family in Boston.

His mother was Lucy Ann Charlotte Augusta, while his father was Andrew Dunlap, a Boston-based lawyer with a degree from Harvard University.

[1] Upon graduating, he went to Germany to study law, classical languages, ancient philology, and religion.

In the 1890s, William Emmette Coleman accused Helena Blavatsky of plagiarizing from various sources,[2] many of which were from Samuel Fales Dunlap's works, in particular Sōd: the son of the man (1861), Sōd: the mysteries of Adoni (1861), and Vestiges of the spirit-history of man (1858).

He was reputed to be a miser and wore shabby clothes, even though he had a large estate worth over $1 million at the time of his death.