Josiah Gilbert Holland was born on July 24, 1819, in Belchertown, a town that shaped the early years of this American writer. He pursued his education at Berkshire Medical College and at East Texas Baptist University, a course of study that preceded the literary and journalistic career he would go on to build.

Holland worked as a novelist, poet, and journalist, composing in the English language across all three forms throughout his life. His output ranged from verse to fiction to the kind of prose that served the periodical press, a breadth that characterized his engagement with American letters during the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century. The Library of Congress Name Authority records him under Holland, J. G. (Josiah Gilbert), 1819–1881, a designation that traces the full arc of his working years from their beginning to their close.

Holland died in New York City on October 12, 1881, some sixty-two years after his birth in Belchertown. The distance between those two places marks the span of a life spent largely in the work of writing, across the forms and modes that the facts of his career reflect.