Millar was raised in his parents' native
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. There he met and married
Margaret Sturm in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970. He began his career writing stories for
pulp magazines. While doing graduate study at the
University of Michigan, he completed his first novel,
The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as
Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary
John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1951.
Macdonald first introduced the popular detective
Lew Archer, the tough but humane private eye, in the 1946 short story "Find the Woman." A full-length novel,
The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966
Paul Newman film
Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to
California, settling for some thirty years in
Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. (Macdonald's fictional name for Santa Barbara was Santa Teresa; this "pseudonym" for the town was subsequently resurrected by
Sue Grafton, whose "alphabet novels" are also set in Santa Teresa.) The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers
The Goodbye Look,
The Underground Man, and
Sleeping Beauty, concluded with
The Blue Hammer in 1976. Lew Archer derives his name from one of Macdonald's high school teachers (not from Sam Spade's partner Miles Archer) and from
Lew Wallace, author of
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
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