Nash was born in Rye, New York, on Milton Point,[4] the son of Mattie (Chenault) and Edmund Strudwick Nash.[5][6] Nash was baptized at Christ's Church.[4] At two years old, his family had a house called "Ramaqua", on fifty acres near Port Chester.[4][7] His father owned and operated a turpentine company.[7]
Because of business obligations, the family often relocated. Nash was descended from Abner Nash, an early governor of North Carolina. The city of Nashville, Tennessee, was named after Abner's brother, Francis, a Revolutionary War general.[8][9]
Throughout his life, Nash loved to rhyme. "I think in terms of rhyme, and have since I was six years old", he stated in a 1958 news interview.[10] He had a fondness for crafting his own words whenever rhyming words did not exist but admitted that crafting rhymes was not always the easiest task.[10]
His family lived briefly in Savannah, Georgia, in a carriage house owned by Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA. He wrote a poem about Mrs. Low's House. After graduating from St. George's School in Newport County, Rhode Island, Nash entered Harvard University in 1920, only to drop out a year later.
He returned as a teacher to St. George's for one year before he returned to New York.[11] There, he took up selling bonds about which Nash reportedly quipped, "Came to New York to make my fortune as a bond salesman and in two years sold one bond—to my godmother. However, I saw lots of good movies."[11] Nash then took a position as a writer of the streetcar card ads for Barron Collier,[11] a company that had employed another Baltimore resident, F. Scott Fitzgerald. While working as an editor at Doubleday, he submitted some short rhymes to The New Yorker. The editor Harold Ross wrote Nash to ask for more: "They are about the most original stuff we have had lately."[12] Nash spent three months in 1931 working on the editorial staff for The New Yorker.[11][13]
In 1931, Nash published his first collection of poems, Hard Lines, the same year, which earned him national recognition.[14] Some of his poems reflected an anti-establishment feeling. For example, one verse, titled "Common Sense", asks:
Why did the Lord give us agility, If not to evade responsibility?
