James Ramsey Ullman was born in New York City, the son of Alexander F. Ullman. As a boy, he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In 1929, he graduated from Princeton University and moved to Brooklyn to begin work in journalism as a newspaper reporter and feature writer.
Ullman decided to try his hand at producing theater, which included the production of plays such as "Faraway Horses", "Men in White", "Blind Alley", and "The Milky Way". However, no production with which he was associated made it to Broadway.
After a string of failed productions, Ullman decided to take a fresh look at his career and traveled to the Amazon to relieve a growing fascination for travel and the lure of adventure. This experience inspired a travelogue narrative, "The Other Side of the Mountain" (1938),upon his return to America.
Although he took a position with the Federal Theater, he began to devote himself to freelance writing and produced short stories and articles with the emphasis on mountain climbing, which he had taken up enthusiastically as a hobby and a means to satisfy his adventure urge.
Ullman made a trip to the Tetons in Montana in 1941 and climbed with guide and later Himalayan mountaineer Paul Petzoldt. This must have inspired his first book on the subject of mountain climbing, "High Conquest" (1941),which was the first of nine books for the publisher J.B. Lippincott.
World War II intervened at this point, and Ullman was with the American Field Service from 1941 to 1943. True to one's life experiences, he was inspired to write a first novel, "The White Tower" (1945),which was about a post-World War II veteran American and casual mountaineer who climbs a fictitious unclimbed and killer peak that had taken the life of the father of his Swiss love interest.
Ullman's traveling continued to inspire new literary projects: books as well as many magazine articles. He had already gone to South America in 1937 and spent more time there in 1946 and enjoyed the chance to hike in the foothills of the Andes.
An interest in the continued attempts at climbing the highest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest, prompted the 1947 book "The Kingdom of Adventure: Everest". Ullman and his wife (they had three children) vacationed in Europe in 1951 and 1952, which at some point gave him the opportunity to achieve a climber's historical goal -- do the classic northeast ridge route on the Matterhorn.
The early 1950s marked notable events in world mountaineering history in the Himalayas. Annapurna was climbed by the French led by Maurice Herzog in 1950, and nearly 30 years after the British sustained efforts on Everest in the 1920s, an Anglo/Tibetan team reached that summit in 1953.
For Ullman this was all fertile authoring material. In 1954, he completed "Banner in the Sky", a historical fiction of the first ascent of the Matterhorn, involving a young Swiss man whose father had died in an attempt - a basic storyline reminiscent of "White Tower". Another of Ullman's books had made it to the screen, "Windom's Way" (1957),and with "Banner" winning the Newbery Award for children's literature in 1955, the book was certainly Hollywood bound.
Ullman was busy otherwise in the meantime. There were more novels of faraway places, a continuation of his history of mountaineering with "The Age of Mountaineering" (1954),and his ghost writing of the biography of co-Everest conqueror Tenzing Norgay, "Man of Everest" (originally published as "Tiger of the Snows", 1955).
Travel continued as well: Africa and a climb up Kilimanjaro (1957) and back to Europe (1958). Walt Disney optioned "Banner" as the feature "Third Man on the Mountain" (1959) with a cast headed by veterans Michael Rennie and Herbert Lom and up-and-coming young male lead James MacArthur.
Ullman was off to the South Pacific from 1959 to 1960, visiting Pitcairn Island, Fiji, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Wake, and the U.S. Pacific Island Trust. He finished out 1960 with a noteworthy biography of American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell in "Down the Colorado with Major Powell".
The mountain experience continued to drive Ullman's writing. Ullman's fascination with Everest garnered a special dream-come-true status when he was asked to be the official historian for the American attempt on the summit in 1963 headed by Swiss/American Norman Dyhrenfurth, who was able to interest the National Geographic Society to foot the bill
