Maurice Allen Hughes was born to Maurice and Bessie (Collyer) Hughes on 28 December 1921 in Brownsburg, Indiana. In 1937, the family moved to Washington, D. C., where Hughes attended George Washington University (1940-1942). From 1943 to 1946, he served in the United States Naval Reserve. He gave music lectures at the Toledo Museum of Art from 1946 to 1947 while completing his B.A. and B.Mus. at the University of Michigan. He subsequently moved to New York City and did postgraduate work at NYU (1948-1950). During the first decade of his career, Hughes worked as an assistant editor and critic at Musical America (1950-1953), a free-lance writer in Paris (1953-1955), a music critic at The New York Herald Tribune (1955-1960), and a music instructor at Brooklyn College (1958-1960). In 1960, he started working at The New York Times, where he was a dance critic (1961-1964) and a music critic (1960-1961, 1965-1986). On 28 March 1964, Hughes married Marian "Nina" Berklich, who graduated from Wayne State University and worked as an interior designer and a theater make-up artist. Although Hughes retired in 1986, he continued writing about dance for The New York Times and wrote a column for Chamber Music from 1998 to 2002. In 2003, he and his wife moved to Sarasota, Florida. Hughes died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on 16 November 2009.