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Benjamin Appel was born in 1907 in New York City. His parents had emigrated from Poland and later settled in Hell's Kitchen, a famously rough neighborhood on New York's Westside. Appel spent his childhood and youth there and used it as the setting for many of his novels. His parents, he said, "attempted to shield me as best they could from the casual ordinary day-to-day terror of a poor neighborhood, with its crime, drunkenness, vice, corruption, suffering, ignorance." Appel attended the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and graduated from Lafayette College in 1929.

As a young man, Appel worked as a bank clerk, farmer, lumberjack and factory-hand. He was a housing inspector for New York City and some of his early manuscripts are written on the back of building service maintenance stationery. During World War II, he served in several capacities including aviation mechanic. Between 1943 and 1945, he was employed by the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense and the War Manpower Commission. He was a special assistant to the U.S. Commissioner for the Philippines from 1945-46 and was granted the rank of colonel (simulated) in Manila. His novel, Fortress in the Rice, emerged from his experiences in the Philippines and was made into the 1963 movie Cry of Battle starring Rita Moreno, Van Heflin and James MacArthur.

Appel's first published work was a collection of poetry, Mixed Vintage, which came out in 1929. During the 1930s he published widely in the "little" literary magazines. His first novel, Brain Guy, the story of small time con men, poverty, prostitution and murder was published in 1934. The New Yorker called it "a street-corner Macbeth of our day." Several further novels continued the themes introduced in Brain Guy especially Runaround, published in 1937 which dealt with politics, and The Power-House, from 1939, which told the story of corruption in the formation of a labor union for waiters in New York City. In 1943, Appel published The Dark Stain, an exploration into the ugliness and cruelty between black and white Americans and how the morass of racial prejudice devours even those of good intentions.

Appel's reviews in prestigious publications such as The Saturday Review of Literature, Books and The New York Times constantly refer to him as an authentic voice of the streets, a writer who is able to evoke the dark and repulsive truths of poverty, corruption and racism that infect the streets of urban America. The New York Times described The Power-House as "a brilliant book written with the cold, corroding passion of one who has been through the heat of human poverty and degradation, and had all the softness and sham burned away." Appel is most often compared to James Cain and Dashiell Hammett.

Appel married Sophie Marshak in 1936 and they had three daughters. The family moved to Roosevelt, New Jersey in 1947 and Appel lived there until his death in 1977. In 1956, Appel began publishing literature for juveniles with the introduction of We Were There in the Klondike Gold Rush. This was followed by We Were There at the Battle for Bataan and We Were There with Cortes and Montezuma. Appel also wrote for the Why They Are The Way They Are series, including books about the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese. Other titles in the juvenile genre include The Illustrated Book About South America, Including Mexico and Central America, 1960; With Many Voices: Europe Talks About America, 1963; Hitler From Power to Ruin, 1964; Ben-Gurion's Israel, 1965; Man and Magic, 1966 and The Fantastic Mirror: Science Fiction Across the Ages, 1969.