Born in New York City in 1904, a great-great-nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Beecher moved to Alabama at the age of three. He graduated from high school at fourteen, and was working twelve-hour days in a Birmingham steel mill at age sixteen.

Beecher studied engineering, sociology, and literature at Virginia Military Institute and the universities of Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, as well as at Cornell, Harvard, and the Sorbonne. He went on to teach at Dartmouth, Wisconsin, San Francisco State College, Arizona State University, and the University of Santa Clara, where he was poet in residence during 1963-1965. During 1966-1967 he was visiting professor of creative writing at Miles, an African American college in Birmingham.

For eight years during the Great Depression, Beecher worked for various New Deal programs: as a district relief administrator in North Carolina, social research supervisor in Mississippi, manager of resettlement communities in Alabama, state director of Florida migratory labor camps, and regional manager for President Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practice Committee in the South and, subsequently, in New York and New England.

Beecher was a crew member of the S.S. Booker T. Washington, the first racially integrated American military unit during World War II. Following the war he directed 30 camps for displaced persons in and near Stuttgart, Germany. He has worked on a number of newspapers and published many books of poetry. He also made an extensive study of farmer-labor politics in Minnesota, which provided the basis for the monograph that comprises this collection.