Janko Veselinović was too young to join in the Serbo-Turkish war; but as a teenager in Mačva he saw the fighting, and he inherited a militant Serbian tradition that went back five hundred years, if not more. His father was a parish priest and staff officer in the Serbian army. After graduating from a teacher's college in Belgrade, he returned to the Serbian countryside, in Mačva, west of Belgrade, to teach in different towns and villages (Svilajnac, Glogovac, Šabac and Koceljeva). Living close to his villagers, he began to write stories about their life and soon published his first collection of stories, Slike iz soeskog zivota (Pictures of Village Life, 1866). More were to follow; by the end of his relatively short career he had nonetheless written many stories about the latter half of the 19th century, rural life in Serbia. He moved to Belgrade and attempted to write about life in a city, but with little success. From 1893 he lived in Belgrade, where he was an associate editor of government-owned Srpskih Novina (Serbian News). In 1894, he founded and edited a journal of his own, Zvezda (The Star), but regular issues were published only from 1896 to 1901. At one time he wrote plays for the National Theatre in Belgrade, in collaboration with Serbian stage actor Čiča Ilija Stanojević. He died at Glogovac on 14 June 1905.

According to literary critic Jovan Skerlić and others, Veselinović is best known for his description of the idyllic peasant life in Serbia. Veselinović, even though a realist, idealized his rural folk, adding poetic touches to his descriptions of them. He drew much from the native folklore as well. Even though he depicted the seamy side of rural life, he seemed to lean towards its idyllic aspect, as if trying to arrest the advance of civilization. He also wrote the play Djido.