Dick Higgins was born in Cambridge, England on March 15, 1938. Higgins was raised in New England and attended private boarding school, before attending Yale University, Manhattan School of Printing, and the New School. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University in 1960 and a master's degree from New York University in 1977. Higgins married artist Alison Knowles in 1960, and they had two daughters, Hannah and Jessica Higgins. Higgins and Knowles divorced in 1970 and remarried in 1984. Higgins died of a heart attack in Quebec City in 1998.

Dick Higgins was a founding member of the Fluxus movement. He established the Something Else Press in 1963, which printed unusual books of avant-garde art and literature by others in the movement. Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books, and was an early and influential proponent of computer-generated literary texts.

Between 1963 and 1974 Something Else Press issued over sixty unusual books of avant-garde art and literature, including the first "artists' books" with major works by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Dieter Rot, among others. Editors included Emmett Williams and Jan Herman. Something Else Press was founded in 1963 by Dick Higgins in Chelsea (Manhattan, New York), eventually relocating to West Glover, Vermont in the 1970s. It went defunct in 1974, which Higgins blamed on Herman's mismanagement.

Upon the press's founding, Higgins wrote "When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as 'something else.' Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing. Always it is something else." Something Else Press was an early publisher of concrete poetry and other works by artists in the Fluxus movement. In addition to artists books, the press reprinted works by allied writers, including Gertrude Stein and Henry Cogwell.