Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire.

Beginning shortly before his 16th birthday in January 1920,[2] Zukofsky attended Columbia University's undergraduate men's college and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied English.

Some of his teachers and classmates subsequently emerged as important lodestars of midcentury literature and culture, namely Mark Van Doren (who maintained a lifelong acquaintance with Zukofsky despite lambasting him as a "painfully inarticulate soul" in a 1927 article[3]), John Dewey, John Erskine, Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler (who may have enjoined Zukofsky to study the humanities instead of engineering).

Although he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa upon completing nearly all of the undergraduate curriculum in three and a half years, much like Adler, Zukofsky did not receive a Columbia College degree after dropping out of the required physical education course.

Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, the Zukofskys lived in Brooklyn Heights, then from 1964 to 1973 in Manhattan, and finally they retired to the Suffolk County outer suburb of Port Jefferson, New York, where he completed his magnum opus "A" and his last major work, the highly compressed poetic sequence 80 Flowers.

"A"-10 is a cry of despair in response to the fall of France in June 1940 structured on Bach's Mass in B minor, after which Zukofsky paused work on "A" for some years.

In 1948, Zukofsky returned to "A" after a hiatus of eight years with the second half of "A"-9, which again copies the complex form of Cavalcanti's canzone, but now using content primarily derived from Spinoza's Ethics.

The distinct concerns of the two-halves of "A"-9 mark a decisive shift of emphasis from the political and social to the more personal and philosophical, but without repudiating the earlier focus.

Avoiding pre-determined narratives or themes, Zukofsky always intended that "A"'s development would be determined by historical and personal changes over the time of the poem's composition.

This movement was shortly followed up with "A"-12, a sprawling 135-page collage interweaving the personal, current events and philosophy, primarily represented by Aristotle, Paracelsus and Spinoza.

This work was as much a statement on poetics as a exegesis of Shakespeare presented in the unorthodox critical manner Zukofsky preferred, marshalling and collaging large numbers of quotations from numerous texts.

When finally published in 1964, Bottom was accompanied by a companion volume consisting of Celia Zukofsky's musical setting of Shakespeare's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Along with the other "Objectivists", from around 1960 Zukofsky was in considerable demand among these younger poets, and consequently was able to publish numerous volumes over the last decade and half of his life, a period when he wrote prolifically and inventively.

A sense of the everyday is interwoven with contemporary events, with "A"-15 responding to the assassination of President Kennedy and "A"-18 darkened by the trauma of the Vietnam War.

"A"-21 is a complete and quirky translation of Plautus' play Rudens (The Rope) interspersed with additional "Voice offs" of Zukofsky's invention.

In this late work the soundscape tends to predominate over thematic or narrative orders, or as he once put it, "not to fathom time but literally to sound it as on an instrument.

On finally completing "A" in 1974, Zukofsky promptly started on his last major work, 80 Flowers, a sequence of eighty-one short poems (8 lines of five words each), highly compressed reworkings of botanical and literary materials.

This was particularly the case because most of the Objectivists produced their most mature and innovative work during the 1960s and 1970s, which in many respects represented a salutatory formal emphasis that contrasted with the looseness of most Beat and projectivist verse.

Aside from Duncan and Creeley, among the many American poets who have acknowledged the influence of Zukofsky in their work include Theodore Enslin, Ronald Johnson, John Taggart and Michael Palmer.

The primary repository of Louis Zukofsky's manuscripts, notebooks and papers is the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.