Joseph Kinsey Howard was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, on February 28, 1906, the son of John R. and Josephine "Howdy" Kinsey Howard. In 1911 John accepted a position as the mine manager for the Canada West Coal Mine in Taber, Alberta, and the family moved to Canada. Around 1917 John Howard deserted his wife and child, and Josephine moved to Lethbridge. In December 1918 Josephine and Joe moved to Great Falls, Montana. Joseph Kinsey Howard graduated from Great Falls High School in 1923, and immediately thereafter took a job with the Great Falls Leader. By the age of 20, Howard had become the news editor, a position he held until 1944, when he left the newspaper to become co-director of the Montana Study. The Montana Study was a three-year project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation that sought to bring college education to people living in Montana's rural areas, to raise the state's "appreciative and spiritual" standard of living, and to stabilize community life. The Montana Study proved to be controversial and when the grant support was exhausted, it was not renewed. During the 1930s Howard produced many manuscripts for short stories and articles for magazines.

In 1943 he published his first book Montana: High, Wide and Handsome, which acquired immediate national critical acclaim. Using material gathered around the state while involved with the Montana Study, Howard published Montana Margins: A State Anthology in 1946. Howard provided the initial introduction and the introductory essays about each of the contributors and the work itself. In 1947 Howard received a Guggenheim Fellowship to gather research materials for a study of the 19th-century Metis rebellions in Canada. The result was published posthumously as Strange Empire in 1952. Jean MeReynolds, a friend of the Howards, who lived in San Francisco, California, was called "Doody" by Joseph. Joseph Kinsey Howard died of a heart attack on August 25, 1951, at his cabin near Choteau.