Frederic Hunter served as a Foreign Service Officer in the United States Information Service in Brussels, Belgium, and, shortly after its independence, at three posts in the Republic of the Congo: Bukavu, Coquilhatville, and Léopoldville. He later became the Africa Correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, based in Nairobi.

A playwright / screenwriter, Hunter's award-winning stage work, The Hemingway Play, was given a reading at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, presented at Harvard University's Loeb Drama Center and produced by PBS's Hollywood Television Theater series. Other plays have been performed at the Dallas Theatre Center, ACT in San Francisco, and the Ensemble Theater in Santa Barbara.

Movies Hunter has written have been produced by PBS, ABC, and CBS. Research for his PBS drama Lincoln and the War Within led him to write the historical novel Abe and Molly: The Lincoln Courtship. He's taught screenwriting at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, at UCSB, and at Principia College where he also taught Modern African Literature. Hunter's Africa experience is the basis for several of his novels.