Richard Hughes was cadet in training when the 1918 armistice was signed and spent World War II as an Admiralty bureaucrat; it was this experience that caused him to write The Human Predicament.

In order to adequately mix his fictional characters with historical figures, Hughes relied on firsthand accounts and family papers from German relatives and friends, including distant relation Baroness Pia von Aretin (whom he acknowledges in the 1961 US edition of the novel) and Helene Hanfstaengl, wife of Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had been a friend of Hitler's in the early 1920s.

[4] Hughes also gives an explanation for his unconventional description of the Munich Putsch saying that his narrative "is based on a vivid contemporary account by an actual Nazi participant, a Major Goetz.

The Fox in the Attic was originally published in 1961 by Chatto & Windus: London as volume 1 of The Human Predicament, and then in the United States by Harper & Brothers: New York.

The second volume in The Human Predicament, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973 by Chatto & Windus: London; it carries on the story to 1934 and the Night of the Long Knives.