Lazaro Francisco was born on February 22, 1898 in a small town near the city of Orani. He spent his childhood years in a small town in the Philippines called Cabanatuan. He graduated from the Central Agricultural College of Luzon. He was not able to finish his College because it was too expensive. He became the Provincial Treasurer's Office of Nueva Ecija's messenger.

In later times, he took the third-degree civil service examination and qualified as an assessor for the provincial government of Nueva Ecija. 

In 1925, he began writing novels, five of which made him famous. Most of his writings focused on small farmers and their current conditions with foreign businessmen. He won separate awards from the Commonwealth Literary Contest in 1940 and 1946, for his masterpieces, Singsing na Pangkasal and Tatsulok, respectively.

In 1958, he established the Kapatiran ng mga Alagad ng Wikang Pilipino, a society that campaigned the use of Tagalog as the national language of the Philippines. He received other prestigious awards and accolades in his lifetime, including the Balagtas Award (1969), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1970) and the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award from the government of Manila.

In 2009, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo renamed the Philippine National Artist for Literature to Francisco, posthumously, for his significant contribution to Philippine literature.

The famous novelist is known as Ka Saro, and Francisco is recognized for his masterful use of Tagalog and his choice of subject matter and storylines which largely focused on the lives of farmers and the challenges they faced in a landlord-tenant relationship- long before agrarian reform was acknowledged as a necessary measure. He has written extensively on freedom, imperialism, communism, the judicial system, the survival of democracy, and the maltreatment of children. He also wrote stories which were serialized in Liwayway Magazine and was faithfully followed by readers. He was also known for his popular love stories that were serialized in Liwayway Magazine, which was followed by readers faithfully, but with a twist. Writers of higher ranks are paid more than writers of lower ranks, who are paid based on their abilities and how many pages they write. He was feared by the typesetters; he was reluctant to allow any change to the text, even when errors occurred.