Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York. His father owned and operated an import-export company, and because of business obligations, the family relocated often.

In 1920, Nash entered Harvard University, only to drop out a year later. He worked his way through a series of jobs, eventually landing a position as an editor at Doubleday publishing house, where he first began to write poetry.

In 1931 he published his first collection of poems, Hard Lines, earning him national recognition. Some of his poems reflected an anti-establishment feeling. For example, one verse, entitled Common Sense, asks:

Why did the Lord give us agility,
If not to evade responsibility?

When Nash wasn’t writing poems, he made guest appearances on comedy and radio shows and toured the United States and England, giving lectures at colleges and universities.

Nash was regarded respectfully by the literary establishment, and his poems were frequently anthologized even in serious collections such as Selden Rodman's 1946 A New Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Nash was the lyricist for the Broadway musical One Touch of Venus, collaborating with librettist S. J. Perelman and composer Kurt Weill. The show included the notable song "Speak Low (When You Speak Love)."

Nash and his love of the Baltimore Colts were featured in the December 13, 1968 issue of Life Magazine. Several poems about the Baltimore Colts are matched to full-page pictures. The cover of the magazine reads, "My Colts / Versus and Reverses by Ogden Nash" and has the following poem:

Look at Number 53,
Dennis Gaubatz,
that is he,
looming 10 feet tall
or taller
above the Steelers'
signal caller...
Since Gaubatz acts like
this on Sunday,
I'll do my
quarterbacking Monday.'

Nash died in 1971 and is interred in North Hampton, New Hampshire. His daughter Isabel was married to noted photographer Fred Eberstadt, and his granddaughter, Fernanda Eberstadt, is an acclaimed author.

Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect, as in his retort to Dorothy Parker's dictum, Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses:

A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectacled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.

He often wrote in an exaggerated verse form with pairs of lines that rhyme, but are of dissimilar length and irregular meter. Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man uses this device to good effect. He opens by noting it is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant...

He develops this at some length, expounding on the superiority of sins of commission, because

You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done...

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