Dennis Cooper was born in Pasadena, California. His literary aspirations were explored early on and often took the form of imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, De Sade, and Baudelaire. He wrote poetry and stories in his early teens that explored scandalous and often extreme subjects.

As a teenager, Cooper was an "outsider" and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners and writers. After highschool he attended Pasadena City College and later Pitzer College where he encountered a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning.

In 1976 Cooper went to England to become involved in the nascent punk scene transforming the visual/verbal aesthetic of punk into its written counterpart - see, for example, Closer. In the same year he began "Little Caesar Magazine" which included among other things an issue on and dedicated to Rimbaud. In 1978 with the success of the magazine, Cooper was able to found Little Caesar Press which featured the work of, among others, Brad Gooch, Amy Gerstler, Elaine Equi, Tim Dlugos, and Eileen Myles.

In 1979, Cooper became the director of programming at an alternative poetry space, "Beyond Baroque", in Venice, California. In 1984, Cooper moved to New York City. In 1987 he met his Dutch boyfriend whom he soon followed back to Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam he finished writing Closer which took as inspiration a postcard that featured an image of Mickey Mouse carved onto the back of a young boy. Cooper later won the Ferro-Grumley for gay literature for Closer.

While in Amsterdam he also wrote articles for different American magazines including the Village Voice. He soon returned to New York and began writing articles for Artforum and began working on his next novel, Frisk. In the next few years Cooper works on several different art and performance projects including co-curating an exhibit at LACE with Richard Hawkins entitled Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men.

Presently, Cooper lives in Los Angeles. He has, after his final return to Los Angeles from New York, collaborated with a number of artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others. In the Spring of 2000 he published the final novel, Period, of the series that began with Closer, followed by Frisk, Try, and Guide.