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Born in Ferron, Utah, in 1893, Lowry Nelson received his B.S. degree in agronomy from Utah State Agricultural College in 1916. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1924 and 1929 from the University of Wisconsin. Much of his early career was centered in Utah. First, he served as secretary to the president of Utah State Agricultural College from 1917 to 1919. From 1919 to 1920 he acted as Sanpete County agricultural agent and as the assistant state leader of county agent work.

In 1921 Nelson shifted fields to become editor of the Utah Farmer, the state farm magazine. Two years later he joined the staff of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, as director of the University Extension Division, serving from 1923 to 1934. In 1929 he was also made dean of the College of Applied Science, holding both positions until 1934. It was during his BYU years that he married Florence Newell in 1924.

In 1934 Dr. Nelson organized the social welfare division of the Utah Emergency Relief Administration. During the next year he was regional advisor for the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Utah, Nevada, California, and Arizona. As assistant director of the Rural Rehabilitation Division, Resettlement Administration, Lowry Nelson spent 1935-1936 in Washington, D. C., then returned to Utah State Agricultural College for a year as director of the Agricultural Experiment Station. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, as a rural sociologist in 1937. On June 30, 1958, Lowry Nelson retired from the university after twenty-one years of service.

Lowry Nelson had several overseas assignments. In 1938 he attended, as the United States member, the first Permanent Agricultural Committee meeting of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, and attended subsequent conferences in 1947 and 1949. In 1945 and 1946, he was a rural sociologist for the United States Department of State and made a study of Caribbean rural life. It was from research for this study he wrote the book Rural Cuba, published in 1950. In 1954 and 1955, Nelson studied Italian rural life under a Fulbright research award.

Following his return from Cuba in 1947, Lowry Nelson received a letter from Heber Meeks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints inquiring about the possibilities of doing missionary work in Cuba. This letter precipitated Nelson's interest in the L.D.S. church's policies toward Black people. From this beginning Dr. Nelson maintained a lifelong interest in the question and communicated frequently with church authorities about a variety of church-related problems. He published articles, books, and pamphlets about the L.D.S. church, some of which were met with disfavor by church authorities.

Nelson was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Farm Tenancy Committee in 1936 which drafted the recommendation that Congress create the Farm Security Administration. In 1952 he was a consultant for the Ford Foundation to study the problem of evaluating technical assistance in Latin Americirca In 1957 he was a consultant to the International Cooperation Administration on special assignment in Brazil.

After retirement from the University of Minnesota, in 1958, Dr. Nelson undertook a number of assignments to Latin American countries under the United States Agency for Independent Development (AID) and acted as a visiting professor of sociology at Cornell University, the University of Florida, and the University of Puerto Rico. Beginning in 1966 he spent six years studying Cuban life under Fidel Castro which resulted in his book Cuba: The Measure of a Revolution, published in 1972.

Lowry Nelson died in 1986.