He was born in the city of Cork and educated at the Presentation Brothers and St. Patrick's College of Education, Dublin where he trained as a teacher. He taught at schools in Cork but resigned from St Patrick's School there in 1921 when he was refused the headmastership. He then taught art for the local technical education committee, before becoming inspector of Irish in 1925, and later Professor of English at University College Cork in 1930. Among his students were Frank O'Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin.

In his late twenties he learnt Irish and this brought him into contact with leading members of the Irish Language revival movement, including Terence MacSwiney, T. C. Murray and Con O'Leary, with whom he founded the Cork Dramatic Society in 1908. His plays Embers and The Hermit and the King were performed by the society. Later plays were staged at the famous Abbey Theatre, including The Labour Leader (1919) and The Yellow Bittern (1920).

He was also a writer of short stories, including the collections A Munster Twilight (1916), The Hounds of Banba (1920), The Stormy Hills (1929), and Earth Out of Earth (1939), and a novel, The Threshold of Quiet (1917).

He also wrote non-fiction works, including The Hidden Ireland (1924), a highly influential work about the riches of eighteenth century Irish poetry. In this he attempted to reconstruct a worldview preserved by Gaelic poets amongst the poor and oppressed Catholic peasantry of the Penal Laws era, virtually invisible in the Anglo-Irish tradition that had dominated the writing of Irish history. "An instant, influential classic", wrote Patrick Walsh, "its version of the past provided powerful cultural underpinning to the traditional nationalist history that became, in the 1930s, the educational orthodoxy of the new state."

Daniel Corkery's papers are held in the Boole Library of University College Cork. A listing is available here [1].

He was a member of Seanad Éireann 1951—1954 when he was nominated by the Taoiseach.His electoral record in Oireachtas Members Database has been conflated without another Daniel Corkery who served in the Oireachtas from 1922 to 1948.