His father, Eugen, was the son of a forest brigade soldier and himself fought in World War II; he became a schoolteacher in 1931.
He entered primary school in his native village (in his mother's class), then as a war refugee took third grade in Văcarea, Argeș, receiving top marks.
In November 1950 he was the youngest participant at a meeting of young Moldavian writers, being hailed as a "local wonder"; he recited a poem of his own there.
That summer, he stopped attending courses there, resuming them on an infrequent basis the next year and obtaining the maximum grade in Romanian on his graduating exam in Fălticeni in August 1954.
In the spring of 1954, the Union of Working Youth (UTM) also held discussions about him and, with one vote against, decided to expel him from the organisation.
In March 1956, he gave a fine speech at a national conference of young writers, and that whole year was "uncannily productive": he continued writing and publishing poems besides those in Primele iubiri, drawing admiration and envy, and was actively preparing his next volume.
In June 1956, in a speech stage-managed by propagandist-in-chief Leonte Răutu in an attempt to calm radical passions unleashed by Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the protests in Poland, the socialist realist poet Mihai Beniuc publicly criticised Labiș[1] for the following poem:
Dacă cineva gigantic ar veni Și mi-ar rosti: Eu îți dau viața toată Neîncepută, necăpătată, Dar să mi-o dai în seamă mie S-o duc înspre visata zare purpurie Pe drum neocolit, de netezime, Pe drumul neștiut decât de mine... Deci astfel de mi-ar spune Eu aș simți că tot ce-mi spune-i putred Cu hotărâre i-aș răspunde: Nu cred!
[2] On the night of December 9–10, 1956, shortly after his 21st birthday, Labiș, who had spent several hours with acquaintances drinking coffee and țuică at Casa Capșa and then the Victoria restaurant, was going to take a tram.
Ostensibly, he lost his balance, caught the grille between the wagons, his head hit the pavement, and he was dragged a short distance.
M-a strivit, Pasărea cu clonț de rubin, Iar mâine Puii păsării cu clonț de rubin, Ciugulind prin țărână, Vor găsi poate Urmele poetului Nicolae Labiș Care va rămâne o amintire frumoasă...
Despite the doctors' efforts and an enormous spiritual mobilisation by his colleagues, acquaintances and friends, his condition worsened inexorably.
His classmate Gheorghe Ioniță wrote, "Labiș did not pose any real threat to [the regime] at the time.
The second is that it was suicide; in the 1980s, friends of his began to say that, as he felt the peak of his talent had passed, he did not wish to spend the rest of his life in mediocrity, so he decided to end it.
Another friend observed, "He tried to board in front at the second-class seats, but someone shoved him and, at the last moment, he caught the grille in the middle, between the wagons: I held my eyes wide open".
The Securitate made note of his private conversations that "defamed the communist regime", and his poems too contained veiled anti-communist themes.
On November 3, 1956, at a wedding attended by about a dozen people, he sang the Kingdom of Romania's anthem, "Trăiască Regele".
That month, at Capșa, during an anti-Soviet discussion on the recent Hungarian Revolution, he stood up and loudly recited Eminescu's banned patriotic poem "Doina".
At the beginning of 1958, his second volume of poetry, Lupta cu inerția (The Fight against Inertia), which he had prepared before his death, was published.
Studies, articles, and encomia all appeared in literary magazines through this period, for Labiș proved an enduring source of inspiration and guidance for the 1960s generation of Romanian poets, led by Nichita Stănescu.