Reznikoff was born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, New York of Russian parents. After a year studying journalism, he entered the law school of New York University in 1912 and graduated in 1916. He practised law briefly and entered officer training school in 1918, but failed to see active service before the end of the war.

Reznikoff worked for a time for his family's business as a hat salesman. He then worked for a legal publishing house where he wrote summaries of court records for legal reference books. This experience was to prove important for his later writing.

From his teens, Reznikoff had been writing poetry, much of it influenced by the Imagists, and publishing it himself using handset printing plates. Throughout his writing life, Reznikoff was always concerned to ensure that his work was published, even at his own expense. This appears to have been inspired by a family story of his grandfather, an unpublished Hebrew poet whose manuscripts were destroyed after his death.


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