Frederick Philip Grove was born as Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, then in the German province of West Prussia. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Hamburg. After receiving his "Abitur" from the prestigeous Hamburg school "Johanneum" in 1898, he left for the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn to study philology and later archeology. From Bonn he moved on to Rome and Munich, later to Berlin, and travelled extensively in Italy, settling, for a while, in Palemo.

When Greve could not settle his debts with a former friend in 1903, he was accused of fraud and sent to prison in May 1903. Before, during and after his imprisonment in Bonn and after his release in May, 1904, he translated works by Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, and many others, also editing and translating (from Burton's English) the massive and highly influential 14-volume edition of the Arabian Nights in German.

He also published, among other works of his own, including Wanderungen (1902), a volume of poetry, and a short play in verse he called Helena und Damon (1902), two novels, Fanny Essler (1905) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus (1906). In 1909, still financially hard-pressed, he pretended a suicide and left Germany for North America as a "travelling author,", followed by his wife Else.

Sometime in 1911 or 1912 they separated in the USA. Felix Greve proceeded north to Canada - now calling himself Frederick Philip Grove, working as a school-teacher in small towns in Manitoba, and marrying a colleague in 1914, Catherine Wiens. He restarted his career as a writer sometime in 1919, publishing his first volume of essays in 1922.

Grove taught in several small Manitoba towns, beginning in the Mennonite Reserve, until 1924, when he retired for medical reasons and dedicated himself exclusively to writing and lecturing. His 1928-9 acceptance of an assignment as a speaker under the auspices of the Canadian Club organization led him on three much noticed tours from coast to coast turning the writer into a national celebrity and speaker of note.

After the tragic early death of his daughter May in Rapid City, Manitoba, the Groves moved east and the author worked for a short time as an editor and a publisher in Ottawa. After the demise of the publishing company, Ariston, the Groves bought a farm outside the little southern Ontario town of Simcoe. A son, Arthur Leonard Grove, was born in 1930. In Simcoe, Grove kept on writing, occasionally teaching and farming.

By 1940, Grove's canonical status within Canadian literature was assured. He earned honorary degrees, was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada and finally won the Governor General's Award. Having published no less than twelve novels and books of essays, the author died at the age of sixty-nine in Simcoe, Ontario, his incognito largely intact.

First knowledge about his identity as the former Felix Paul Greve became known to a wider public only in 1973, twenty-five years after his death, thanks to the detective work of Douglas O. Spettigue. Klaus Martens's recent biographies (1997, 2001) based on much documentary, epistolary, and photographic material discovered by him, re-examines and extends previous knowledge of Grove's German and Canadian years as an important literary figure in both countries.