Jack Warren Anderson was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father, George, was a motion picture projectionist at a downtown movie theater and his mother, Eleanore, was a hospital administrator.

In 1959, Anderson joined the staff of the Oakland Tribune, starting as a copy boy but becoming the assistant drama critic the next year.

However, he continued his affiliation with the Times as a freelancer for some years afterward, preparing listings and writing obituaries of notable figures in the dance world.

In 2011 he was named to the Brackett Distinguished Visiting Artist Chair at the University of Oklahoma and was invited to give the commencement address at the college division of the New World School of the Arts in Miami.

[citation needed] From the 1970s through the 1990s, Anderson undertook various research projects in dance history and eventually produced seven books on various subjects: His comprehensive and detailed account of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which flourished in the United States from 1938 until the early 1960s, won the 1981 José de la Torre Bueno Prize for the best English-language writing in dance history, and his concise history of ballet and modern dance, published in 1986, was so popular with general readers and as a textbook for students that a second edition was issued in 1992.

Morton Marcus (1936–2009), for one, offered the following encomium: "Jack Anderson's prodigious imagination creates alternate realities as easily as if they were prefabricated worlds, but so close to our own are they in every wickedly funny and poignant detail that we soon realize we've not been looking out a window but at a mirror.

His pictures of the life we lead are satiric gems, yet so consummate an artist is he that at each thrust of his sardonic wit the reader can do nothing but laugh uproariously and demand more.