He was the son of an innkeeper. He initially worked as a railway official, but took over running the family inn after his father's death. In 1911 he published his first book of poetry. Two years later, he began work on his first novel, Con gli occhi chiusi ("With closed eyes"), which was highly autobiographical.

That same year, he also founded a nationalist, bi-weekly magazine called La Torre and became a journalist in Rome. Through his literary activity, he caught the attention of the writer Luigi Pirandello, who subsequently supported him. Tozzi died in 1920 from a combination of influenza and pneumonia.

Though he was little known even in his homeland at the time of his death, in the following decades Tozzi came to be considered one of the first Italian modernists, and he was a powerful influence on later modernists. Italo Calvino considered him one of the great European writers of Italian descent.

Tozzi's style is concise and laconic (Piper Verlag). According to Alberto Moravia, Tozzi was able to describe great tragedies with simple words.

• Bestie (1917)
• Con gli occhi chiusi (1919)
• Tre croci (1920) (Three Crosses, trans. R. Capellero, 1921)
• Il podere (1921)
• Gli egoisti (1923)
• Ricordi di un impiegato (1927)
• Novelle
• Bestie, cose, persone

• Works by Federigo Tozzi at Biblioteca Italiana (in Italian)
• Giordano, Caterina Francesca (2019). "TOZZI, Federigo". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 96: Toja–Trivelli (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
• Bartoloni, P. (2002). Tozzi, Federigo. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818332-7. Retrieved 15 July 2023. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)