Born in England, the Oxford-educated Anderson moved to Montreal in the early 1940s, where he was employed as a teacher. His interest in writing led to his involvement in poetry newsletters, but he found his metier as the founder of Preview.

His first collection, A Tent for April (1945), includes the unmistakably homoerotic "The Drinker". Anderson's evident influences include W.H. Auden and Hart Crane, and his political views were notably of the left.

In 1943 John Sutherland accused Anderson of a literary representation of "some sexual experience of a kind not normal". Anderson left Canada at the end of the decade, and subsequently published a number of autobiographical works. He co-edited in 1961, Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship.v