Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven. He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family.

As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians. His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old. In 1936, he joined the Young Communist League and became President of the Brooklyn branch, but he left it in 1939 after the Stalin-Hitler pact.

In 1939, at the age of 21, he was editor of both Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, and regularly published his own stories in both of them. He married his first wife in 1940. In 1943 both the magazines he was editing folded, and he worked as a literary agent. During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps from 1945-1945. He divorced his first wife during this period and married his second wife in 1945. In 1948 he married his third wife, Judith Merril, who he divorced in 1953, the same year he married his fourth wife, Carol Metcal Ulf.

In the early 1950s his literary agency business failed, and he returned to editing as an assistant editor at Galaxy Science Fiction and later also If Magazine. In 1966, 1967, and 1968 his magazines won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Magazines. In the 1970s he acquired and edited novels for the "Frederik Pohl Selections" series of Bantam Books. He also began to emerge as a novel writer, and went on to win Nebula Awards for fiction in 1976 and 1977 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

He married his current wife, science fiction editor and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD, in 1984. He continued to write from his home in Palatine, Illinois.

His 1977 novel Gateway won four "year's best novel" awards: the Hugo, the Locus, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas The Years of the City. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993, and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998. Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010 for his blog, "The Way the Future Blogs".