Nekrasov studied at St. Petersburg University, but his father's refusal to help him forced him into literary and theatrical hack work at an early age. His first book of poetry was published in 1840. An able businessman, he published and edited literary miscellanies and in 1846 bought from Pyotr Pletnev the magazine Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), which had declined after the death of its founder, Aleksandr Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to transform it into a major literary journal and a paying concern, despite constant harassment by the censors. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy published their early works in Sovremennik, but after 1856, influenced by its subeditor, Nikolay Chernyshevski, it began to develop into an organ of militant radicalism. It was suppressed in 1866, after the first attempt to assassinate Alexander II. In 1868 Nekrasov, with Mikhail Saltykov (Shchedrin), took over Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the Fatherland”), remaining its editor and publisher until his death.

Nekrasov's work is uneven through its lack of craftsmanship and polish and a tendency to sentimentalize his subjects, but his major poems have lasting power and originality of expression. Moroz krasny-nos (1863; “Red-nosed Frost,” in Poems, 1929) gives a vivid picture of a brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and his large-scale narrative poem, Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows to the full his gift for vigorous realistic satire.