Louis Allan Vaught was born on August 13, 1859, in Jackson, Missouri, the second youngest of a farming family of eight children. Interested in phrenology from an early age, he began teaching school in Kansas and learning everything he could on the subject. Vaught started delivering lectures and after one of them, met Mary "May" Ellen Reid who began managing and promoting his lecture circuits, soon becoming his wife. Two years after May's death in 1900, Vaught married his young stenographer, Nettie McDowell, and that same year he published his only book, Vaught's Practical Character Reader, a handbook for determining a person's personality traits by examining their heads. Plagued from childhood by disease, Vaught died six months later at age 44 on May 5, 1903.