Born on October 29, 1911 in Lewisville, Lafayette County, Arkansas, Ernest "Earnie" Cecil Deane was the son of Ernest Deane and Mabel Drew Deane. Attending public schools in Lewisville and Texarkana (Miller County), he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1934, a journalism major. At the university he met and studied under the man who would become his mentor, Professor Walter Lemke, the founder of the university's Journalism Department. In 1935 he completed a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The following year he married Lois Kemmerer of Magnolia (Columbia County); the couple had one daughter.

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Deane enlisted in the United States Army in January 1942. His background in journalism led him to be assigned as a press officer, and during the war he worked for Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, General Dwight Eisenhower, and General George S. Patton. Rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and decorated with such metals as the Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre, he was discharged from the Army in October 1946. In the period immediately after the war he served as press officer for the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

Upon returning from Germany to the United States, Deane became editor and part owner of the Mexia (Texas) Daily News, working in that capacity from 1949 to 1955. Afterwards he worked for the Arkansas Gazette as editorial page editor and wrote a feature column, "The Arkansas Traveler." In the 1960s Deane left the Arkansas Gazette and returned to Fayetteville, serving in the University of Arkansas's Office of Information Services. From 1968 to 1976 he was an associate professor in the university's Journalism Department. He was also editor of the Washington County Historical Society's journal Flashback. In 1970 he began his "Ozarks Country" column, which was eventually carried by seventeen newspapers. He was the author of Ozarks Country (1975) and Arkansas Place Names (1986), and had his Arkansas Gazette newspaper column republished in the compilation, The Best of the Arkansas Traveler, 1956-1986 (1986). Honored by the Arkansas Press Association with their Outstanding Journalism Teacher Award in 1990, Deane died in Fayetteville on May 7, 1991.