Finney was born in Sedalia, Missouri and served in China with the U.S. Army 15th Infantry Regiment (E Company), 1927-1929. His full name was Charles Grandison Finney, evidently after his great-grandfather, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. His first novel and most famous work, The Circus of Dr. Lao, won one of the inaugural National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1935. In his memoirs, he notes that The Circus of Dr. Lao was conceived in Tientsin in 1929. After the Army, he worked for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Arizona, 1930-1970, as an editor.
Some of Finney's papers, with correspondence and photographs, are collected at the University of Arizona Main Library Special Collections, Collection Number: AZ 024, Papers of Charles G. Finney, 1959-1966. The archive includes typed manuscripts of "A Sermon at Casa Grande", "Isabelle the Inscrutable", "Murder with Feathers", "The Night Crawler", "Private Prince", "An Anabasis in Minor Key", "The Old China Hands", and "The Ghosts of Manacle".
