Greenberg grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City and spent the last years of his life in and out of charity hospitals.

Marc Simon writes, "Jacob and Hannah Greenberg, before coming to the new world, had lived with their family in Vienna.

Greenberg attended public school 160 on Suffix Street at the corner of Rivington, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Crane retyped 41 poems on 32 pages on yellow foolscap and brought the manuscript back to New York with him on the train on January 2, 1924.

A number of his poems have been set to music by the Jewish-American composer Justin Henry Rubin, one of which became a short multimedia film (2007) based on Greenberg's The Pale Memory (completed in collaboration with artist John Merigliano).