Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 into a middle-class black family in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony, now a French département), where he studied under Aimé Césaire at the Lycée Schoelcher. He left Martinique at 18 to join the Free French army. After a brief return to Martinique he left for France again, and studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. Black Skin, White Masks was initially intended as his doctoral dissertation, but was rejected. Fanon lived in Algeria and Tunis, was active in the Algerian independence movement, and also served as the Provisional Algerian Government's Ambassador to Ghana. He died in 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland.

Fanon is both the author and the protagonist of Black Skin, White Masks, most notably in Chapter 5, "The Fact of Blackness." In this chapter, he moves through several stages, from complete innocence of racial difference, to an attempt to reason with irrational racism, to a defiant embrace of blackness and the "black soul," to a state of bereavement when he realizes that the Négritude movement and its celebration of blackness is only a "negative moment" within an historical dialectic. Fanon is also present as a character throughout the other chapters of the book, often sharing anecdotes gleaned from his psychiatric practice or during his years in France.