Born in New York City, Stanley Fisher began his career as a school teacher in Brooklyn, where he started a family and became interested in poetry and the visual art of the Manhattan downtown scene.
Artists Boris Lurie and Sam Goodman became acquainted with Fisher in 1959 while he was in the final stages of compiling his anthology of Beat literature, entitled Beat Coast East, one of the earliest anthologies devoted to the Beats. Fisher included Lurie's works in the anthology. He joined Lurie and Goodman first as a poet and later as an artist at the March Gallery and as a co-founder of the NO!art movement.
Fisher served as a medic during World War II and was present at the invasion of Normandy. As with Lurie and Goodman, his war experience and dissatisfaction with US postwar culture influenced his creative output. Initially focused on writing and poetry, Fisher was "the natural propagandist for our cause," according to Lurie.
In 1961, he began creating collage works which were exhibited in the Involvement and Doom shows at the March Gallery. Influenced in his visual and literary work by his harrowing memories of serving as a combat medic, Fisher's creations exude a raw and unsettling character. Following Fisher's death in 1980, Lurie, his friend and colleague, recalled Fisher as "wild and unstructured... totally liberated from limitations of human modesty, he knew not the meaning of the words fear or shame."