Robert Hewitt Wolfe was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1964 . His father was a career officer in the United States Army and his mother was a nurse. The family moved around the United States to where Wolfe's father was assigned. They stopped moving in the 1970s and settled in San Francisco. Wolfe later attended UCLA where he earned a bachelor's degree in Film and Television and a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting in the late 1980s.