[2] Coburn served in the Army aviation corps during the World War I era.
Coburn began his career with Western stories in general fiction pulp magazines such as Adventure and Argosy.
[5] He often wrote for the Fiction House pulp magazines, which promoted Coburn as "the Cowboy Author".
[4] After the pulps ended in the 1950s, Coburn switched his focus to writing paperback originals.
Coburn claimed, in his posthumously published autobiography Western Word Wrangler (1973) that God had chosen him to spread the Christian message through his fiction.