Otto Fürth was born in Strakonitz, Bohemia, Germany, on November 7, 1894 where he spent the first four years of his childhood. In 1899 his father, Hugo Fürth, relocated the family to Vienna, Austria where he opened a fez factory, the Aktiengesellschaft der Oesterreichischen Fezfabriken.

Otto Fürth spent the next fifteen years of his life in Vienna, where he attended school and then university to study law, philosophy and literature. His university studies were interrupted by the onset of World War I and Fürth's enlistment in the army early in 1915. He was soon shipped to the Russian front, where he was eventually promoted to lieutenant of the artillery division. On July 4, 1916 he was captured and sent to Siberia, where he spent the next three and a half years. Fürth finally managed to escape with a friend and spent the next six years teaching French and German at a German school in Tientsin, China, until he was able to secure passage on a Danish ship headed for Copenhagen.

In 1920 Fürth finally returned to Vienna, where he finished his university degree during the next two years and took a position in the family factory. Fürth spent the next years in Vienna, married Gertrude Harteck in 1924, had daughter Irmgard (1926) and son Harald (1930), and continued to advance in his career. At the same time, he continued to write, a career he always considered secondary. Nonetheless, early in 1931 saw the first performance of his play "Der Mann ohne Privatleben" in the Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna. Although this play achieved moderate success, traveled to a number of European theaters, and had the film rights purchased by Paramount, the most successful of Fürth's plays was the comedy "Zehn Gesichter gegen eins."

With the takeover of Austria by Hitler in 1938, Fürth immediately applied for visas to the United States for himself and his family. Not wishing to wait any longer in Vienna, in August 1939, Fürth took his family to Switzerland, where they stayed for the next year and a half. Finally on August 28, 1941, Fürth and his family arrived in New York harbor.

Fürth, with the aid of a relative, soon secured a position as an accountant for the Wall Street firm of Lazard Frères, a position which he held until his retirement in 1964. Fürth continued to write after his arrival in the United States. His one successful full-length novel, Men in Black (published in 1942 under the pseudonym Owen Elford), was first written in German and translated by Richard Winston into English.

Although Otto Fürth considered himself first and foremost a businessman, and a writer only as a pastime, his literary production consisted of numerous plays (mostly comedies), countless poems, newspaper articles, movie script ideas and one full-length published novel. Fürth died in New York on December 15, 1979.