Richard Hugo was born December 21, 1923 in Seattle and was raised in White Center, a working class district of Seattle. Hugo lived with his grandparents for most of his childhood and early adult life. He served as a bombardier in Italy during World War II. Following the war, Hugo attended the University of Washington, where he studied writing with Theodore Roethke. He earned a BA in 1948 and a MA in 1952. In 1959 Hugo, along with Carolyn Kizer, Earl Pritchard and Nelson Bentley, founded the literary magazine Poetry Northwest.

While continuing to write poetry, Hugo supported himself for 13 years by working for the Boeing Aircraft Company in various jobs, including that of a technical writer. In 1963 he left Boeing to revisit Italy. He returned to the United States in 1964 to accept a teaching position at the University of Montana, where he became Director of the Creative Writing Program in 1971, and where he continued to teach until his death.

During the last two decades of his life, Hugo's reputation as a writer grew with the publication of nine collections of poetry, three chapbooks, a collection of essays and a detective novel. He was twice nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1968, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded him a traveling grant which allowed him to revisit Italy. In 1976 he was appointed editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. In 1977 Hugo received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which allowed him to live in Scotland from 1977-1978. At various times he was a guest lecturer at the University of Iowa, University of Arkansas, University of Colorado, and University of Washington. Hugo survived the loss of a lung to cancer in 1980, but died of leukemia in Seattle on October 22, 1982.

Posthumous publications of Hugo's work include a chapbook, Sea Lanes Out; collected poems, Making Certain It Goes On; and a collection of autobiographical essays, The Real West Marginal Way.