Playwright Martin Flavin was born in San Francisco and moved with his mother to Chicago at an early age when his father died. He attended college there and took an interest in dramatics. Upon graduation he got a job on a newspaper and supplemented his income by writing short stories for magazines. He met with a degree of success in that endeavor but couldn't make enough money to devote his full time to a writing career. His mother's family had a manufacturing business in the Midwest and Flavin decided to go into the family business, but always with an eye toward going back to writing. After 12 years as an executive in the family company he began writing again, but this time as a playwright instead of a short-story writer.

In 1923 one of his plays, "Children of the Moon", was produced on Broadway, and three years later Flavin left the family business to become a full-time playwright. His most famous play, "The Criminal Code" (1929), was inspired by a visit he made to San Quentin Prison in California and the conditions he saw there (it was later made into a classic gangster film, The Criminal Code (1931)).