His father, Meir Lipec, was later director of the publishing house Am Oved.

At the time of the British Mandate in Palestine, while studying Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University, Amir was a member of the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds as well as a founding member of the Canaanite movement (canaanism),[1] which saw Hebrew or Israeli culture as defined by geographical location rather than religious affiliation.

[2] Amir translated over 300 books into Hebrew, including English and French classics by Melville, Charles Dickens, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë and O.

He founded and edited the literary magazine Keshet, which he closed in 1976 after eighteen years of publication to concentrate on his own writing.

He was often known in Israel thanks to a popular song by Meir Ariel, which cited Amir's translation of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream.