Born in humble circumstances, his father being a journeyman tailor and his mother a hostler's daughter, Coppard left school at the age of nine and worked first as an errand boy in Whitechapel, London, and later as a clerk in Brighton and Oxford. His love for literature, painting, and music led him to abandon his office career; he settled in a cottage in the country, and his first book of short stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, was published when he was 43. His talent was recognized and other collections of stories followed, including Fishmonger's Fiddle (1925), which contained what is perhaps his best story, “The Higgler.” The charm of his stories lay in his poetic feeling for the countryside and in his amusing and dramatic presentation of rustic characters.

Several volumes of Coppard's poems were also published, and the first volume of his autobiography, up to the early 1920s, It's Me, O Lord, appeared after his death.