Milan Begović was born in Vrlika on 19 January 1876, the son of a merchant and smallholder Ivan Begović and Filomena born Bressan. In 1882 he enrolled at the local school and continued his education in Split, then in Hamburg, Vienna and Zagreb, and graduated in Slavonic and Romance studies. He spent the last years of his life in Zagreb.

In his works Milan Begović deals with the social environments of these cities. Some of the best of his works were strongly and profoundly influenced by his childhood and later stays in Vrlika. A great connoisseur of European literature and one of the creators of the Croatian Literary Modernism, Milan Begović's most prolific literary period was in the 1920s and 1930s, when he wrote his very best works, including the plays The Holy Man, The Adventurer at the Door and Without the Third One, the comedy An American Yacht in the Harbour of Split, the libretto to the opera Ero the Joker, the comprehensive social-psychological novel Giga Barićeva and the historical novel The Haunted Castle as well as a number of short stories, travel books and feuilletons.