Ronald Steel was born in 1931 in Morris, Illinois outside of Chicago. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and English from Northwestern University (1953) and a Master of Arts degree in political economy from Harvard University (1955).

He served in the United States Army and was a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service.

He is the author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century, the definitive biography of Lippman. For this book, he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1973.

Steel is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations, History, and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Prior to teaching at USC, he taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, UCLA, and Princeton University.

Steel wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and the The New York Review of Books.