This is the first book-length biography of Tudor writer, soldier, and courtier Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604), a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern studies, who lived, wrote, and fought under five different monarchs and enjoyed an unrivalled fifty-year literary career. Matthew Woodcock succeeds in making us look at it afresh to learn much about writing, fighting, constructing an authorial self, and overcoming the challenges of the professional authorship in the rapidly changing conditions of the late sixteenth-century England.