Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, Dorset, in 1931. He attended the Berne University for two years, and then served in the military in Austria, after which he returned to England. He studied modern languages at Lincoln College, Oxford, and graduated in 1956. He then spent two years in Eton as a tutor, after which he joined the Foreign Service. His experiences inspired him to write his first novel, Call For the Dead, which was published in 1961.

After the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, le Carré dedicated himself entirely to his writing. He set out to portray the world of spies and intelligence operatives from a new point of view, as a more realistic and cynical counterpoint to Ian Fleming's flamboyant James Bond - unlike Bond, le Carré's characters struggled with themselves and the clandestine and often corrupt world of the Cold War.