Harold Burton Meyers was born August 2, 1924, to teachers in Arizona. His parents worked for the United States Indian Service (later the Bureau of Indian Affairs). He grew up in "remote and often desolate places" on the Zuni, Navajo, and Hopi Indian reservations, where his parents strove to provide children with educations that would help them better their lives.

Meyers was taught mostly at home; he and his brothers were able to attend public schools for only a couple of years; most of the time they lived too far from such schools. He attended high school at Wasatch Academy, then a boarding school run by the Presbyterian church in Mt. Pleasant, Utah.

During World War II, he served with the Seabees in the Pacific. After an unsuccessful effort to survive as a writer of fiction in New York City, he attended the University of Colorado...