His father, Samuel George Stephens, came from Swansea, Wales, and his mother, originally Euphemia Russell, was born in Greenock, Scotland.

On leaving school he was employed in the printing department of William Henry Groom, proprietor of the Toowoomba Chronicle, and later in the business of A. W. Beard, printer and bookbinder of George Street, Sydney.

In April 1893 having sold his share in the Cairns paper he left Australia for San Francisco, travelled across the continent, and thence to Great Britain and France.

Stephens began work on The Bulletin as a sub-editor, and it was not until after the middle of 1896 that he developed the famous "Red Page" reviews of literature printed on the inside of the cover.

He prepared for publication in 1897 a collected edition of the verses of Barcroft Boake, with a sympathetic and able account of his life, and during the next 20 years he saw through the press, volumes of verse by Arthur Henry Adams, Will H. Ogilvie, Roderic Quinn, James Hebblethwaite, Hubert Newman Wigmore Church, Bernard O'Dowd, Charles H. Souter, Robert Crawford, Shaw Neilson and others.

In prose he recognised the value of Joseph Furphy's Such is Life, and succeeded in getting it published in spite of the realisation of The Bulletin's proprietary that money would be lost in doing so.

He was joint author with Albert Dorrington of a novel, "The Lady Calphurnia Royal", published in 1909, in 1911 a collection of prose and verse, "The Pearl and the Octopus", appeared, and in 1913 "Bill's Idees", sketches about a reformed Sydney larrikin.

A collection of his interviews was published in 1921, "School Plays" in 1924, a short account of Henry Kendall in 1928, and just before his own death a biography of Christopher Brennan.