Although Harvard may be said to have been a home to printing since 1643 when Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, inherited his wife's printing press, plates, and paper, it was not until January 13, 1913, that the Harvard Corporation established the entity known as Harvard University Press. The Press's first Director was C.C. Lane, who had been the university's publishing agent. On January 1, 1920, Lane was succeeded by Harold Murdock, a Boston banker. Murdock's tenure saw the Press greatly expand the number of series it published and undertake the strategy of publishing books of general interest emanating from lectures given at Harvard. The first Norton lectures, Gilbert Murray's The Classical Tradition in Poetry, were published in 1927, and such luminaries as T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, e.e. cummings, Lionel Trilling, Leonard Bernstein, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco, John Cage, and Nadine Gordimer have followed. In 1984 the Press began to publish the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, inaugurated by Eudora Welty's bestselling One Writer's Beginnings, and followed by Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (also a bestseller), Gore Vidal's Screening History, and Alfred Kazin's Writing Was Everything. A number of other distinguished lecture series bear the Press's imprint, among them the Godkin Lectures, the Carl Newell Jackson Lectures, the William James Lectures, the newly created W.E.B. DuBois, Nathan Huggins, Joanna Jackson Goldman Lectures, and the Jerusalem Harvard Lectures.

A signal event in the Press's history occurred in 1934 when it became the American publisher of the Loeb Classical Library®, which James Loeb (Harvard '88) bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1933. The Library, now undergoing a vigorous program of revision and updating, totals nearly 500 volumes of Greek and Latin texts, with facing English translations, and is today published worldwide by the Press, enjoying annual sales of well over 100,000 volumes.

Dumas Malone, editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of American Biography, became the Press's third director in late 1935, and saw the Press's mission as the publication of "scholarship plus," that is, not merely highly specialized works, but works for the general intellectual reader. It was Malone who hired the Press's first manuscript editors, and established the high editorial standards for which the Press has become known. Under Malone the Press published such prominent works as Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, Chester I. Barnard's The Functions of the Executive, and Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key. In 1939 it garnered its first Pulitzer prize for the second and third volumes of Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines. A second Pulitzer came in 1941 for Marcus Lee Hansen's The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860. In 1943 Dumas tendered his resignation to pursue his work on Thomas Jefferson.

Roger Scaife (Harvard '97), a professional publisher, was appointed full-time director for a three-year term on January 1, 1944. During this period the future of the Press was uncertain, since Harvard president James B. Conant had become unenthusiastic about the Press. But the Corporation came to the Press's rescue and the future suddenly seemed less forbidding. During Scaife's administration the Press published, among other notable titles, Willi Apel's Harvard Dictionary of Music, which sold some 155,000 copies in its original edition, over 200,000 in its 1969 revision, and lives on as The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986), edited by Don Michael Randel.

Thomas J. Wilson joined the Press as its fifth director in 1946, coming from his position as the Director of the University of North Carolina Press. During his twenty years at Harvard, Wilson oversaw the expansion of the list, the number of employees, and the net income. But his achievement was perhaps greatest in his enhancement of the Press's relationship with the university--faculty, administration, alumni, friends--and in his raising of the Press's status within the general publishing world, both university press and commercial. Among the authors published during Wilson's term were John K. Fairbank, Paul A. Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Oscar Handlin, Edwin O. Reischauer, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Talcott Parsons, and Edward Shils. In 1953 another Press title, David John Mays' Edmund Pendleton, 1721-1803 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1949 a bequest from Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr. was to have profound implications for the Press, for it established the Belknap Press imprint at Harvard University Press (modeled on the Clarendon Press imprint at Oxford University Press) which "was known for books of long-lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen whether or not they might be profitable." Ten years later, Belknap's mother, Rey Hutchings Belknap, added her fortune to the fund as well. The first title published under the Belknap imprint was the Harvard Guide to American History, which appeared in 1954 and was edited by Harvard professors Oscar Handlin, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Paul Herman Buck. A 1955 Belknap publication, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, received the Carey-Thomas Award for Creative Publishing, as did the early volumes in the Adams Papers project, the John Adams Diary and Autobiography. Yet another Belknap title published under Wilson, Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, received the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1967, following Walter Jackson Bates's 1963 Pulitzer for John Keats, and Ernest Samuels's Pulitzer for his three-volume biography of Henry Adams, whose last volume appeared in 1964.

Mark Carroll, who had joined the Press in 1956, became director in 1967. During Carroll's four-year tenure the Press published such seminal works as John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, E.O. Wilson's The Insect Societies, and Notable American Women: 1607-1950, edited by Edward T. James and Janet W. James. But during the late 1960s and early 1970s the Press began to incur significant unforeseen deficits that caused alarm in the administration, and by February 1972 Mark Carroll had left the Press. After acting directorships by associate director David Horne and Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, Arthur J. Rosenthal took office on October 1, 1972. Rosenthal, founder and publisher of Basic Books, took up Dumas Malone's notion of "scholarship plus" by making Harvard's list more appealing to a wider general readership beyond the academy, and establishing a trend that many other university presses were to follow some years later. Assisted by associate director for operations Brian Murphy he reduced and reorganized staff, quickly improving the financial picture. He also launched new lists in science and psychology, and professionalized the marketing strategies of the Press. Among the stellar titles published during his tenure are Bernard Bailyn's 1975 National Book Award winner, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson; E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature (1978), which received the Pulitzer Prize (as did Wilson's 1990 The Ants, co-authored with Bert Hölldobler); Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand, which received both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1978; Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982), which has sold over 500,000 copies; Thomas K. McCraw's Pulitzer winner, Prophets of Regulation (1984); and Jane Goodall's The Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986). Arthur Rosenthal retired from Harvard University Press in 1990, and was succeeded by William P. Sisler, formerly vice president and executive editor for humanities and social sciences at Oxford University Press (USA).