As a child he drew Ikey and Mikey, a regular comic strip done in chalk on sidewalks. In 1939, Kurtzman entered a cartoon contest in Tip Top Comics, winning a prize of one dollar. Kurtzman attended New York's High School of Music and Art, where he first met future collaborators Will Elder, Harry Chester, Al Jaffee and John Severin. After graduating from Cooper Union, he freelanced for such second-tier comic book companies as Ace and Timely. It was at Timely that he drew his first humorous "Hey Look!" gag cartoons, which Timely used whenever an issue was short one page. Kurtzman also produced a comic strip, Silver Linings, which ran in the New York Herald Tribune from March 7 to June 20, 1948.

Kurtzman found his niche at Bill Gaines' EC Comics, editing the war comics Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales. Kurtzman was known for a painstaking attention to detail, typically sketching full layouts and breakdowns for the stories he assigned to artists and insisting they not deviate from his instructions. All About Comix - allaboutcomix.com via InstantWonder Harvey Kurtzman Despite (or because of) his autocratic approach, Kurtzman's early 1950s work is still considered among the medium's finest. The Comic Journal's Top 100 English-Language Comics of the Century@Everything2.com read yourself RAW - Profile: Harvey Kurtzman

The evolution of Mad was marked by Kurtzman's recognition of his own value and talents. The comic book owed its existence to Kurtzman's complaint to publisher Gaines that EC's two editors — himself and Al Feldstein — were being paid substantially different salaries. Gaines pointed out that Feldstein produced more titles for EC and did so more swiftly. The men then agreed that if Kurtzman could create a humor publication, Gaines would raise his pay substantially.

Four years later, amid an industry crackdown on the comic books that EC was producing, Kurtzman received an offer to join the staff of Pageant. When Gaines agreed to expand Mad from a ten-cent comic book to a 25-cent magazine, Kurtzman stayed with EC. Although retaining Kurtzman was Gaines' prime motivation, this revamp completely removed Mad from the Comics Code Authority's censorious overview, thereby assuring its survival.

Kurtzman remained at the helm of the magazine for only a few issues, but it was long enough to introduce the image soon named Alfred E. Neuman, the publication's famous mascot. Kurtzman was responsible, in 1955, for turning the publication from a comic book into a full-size magazine.

During the 1950s, Kurtzman was one of the writers for the relaunched Flash Gordon daily comic strip, which had previously been one of the Mad targets, when his "Flesh Garden!" parody was illustrated by Wally Wood in 1954.

In April 1956, with Mad sales increasing and all of EC's other titles cancelled, Kurtzman demanded a 51% share of Gaines' business. Gaines balked and hired Feldstein to replace Kurtzman as editor. The incident has been a source of controversy ever since. There are some who feel the magazine critically peaked under Kurtzman and never again regained its magic, settling into a predictable formula. There are others who think Kurtzman's own formulaic tendencies would have worn out their welcome more obviously, if not for his early and sudden exit. Kurtzman's departure may have allowed his fans to fantasize about a magazine-format Mad that never was, in which his satiric eye never fogged, as it did outside of Mad.

The "art vs. commerce" showdown between Kurtzman and Gaines (in which Kurtzman gets the hero's role of David while Gaines plays the vulgarian Goliath) has long been a compelling characterization for some. But it's likely that no 1950s publisher other than Bill Gaines would ever have printed Mad in the first place. Even so, when Kurtzman and Feldstein were producing humor comics at the same time (Feldstein edited EC's lesser sister humor publication Panic), it is generally recognized that the difference in quality was vast. Thus, Feldstein got a reputation as the craftsman who replaced the genius.

However, it's inarguable that Mad's greatest heights of circulation and influence came under Feldstein, while Kurtzman never again recaptured his share of the zeitgeist or edited another magazine of equal success. Kurtzman's supporters say luck was against him, and there is evidence for this. But it's also true that nothing Kurtzman produced after his original Mad run approached it for bite or observational wit. In the end, and for all his substantial achievements, Kurtzman's career was forever colored by a sense of "what might have been."

Kurtzman was also the editor of Trump, published by Hugh Hefner in 1957. It presented Kurtzman's Mad sensibilities in a glossy, upscale magazine format. Trump only lasted for two issues. They reportedly sold well, but were expensive to produce, and publisher Hugh Hefner shut down the project during a costcutting crunch. Kurtzman later led an artists' collective of himself, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth in publishing Humbug. Despite their efforts, and those of business manager Harry Chester, Humbug failed to overcome distribution and financial problems. It folded after 11 issues.

After the demise of Humbug, Kurtzman spent a few years as a freelance contributor to various magazines, including Playboy, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, TV Guide and Pageant, the magazine that had made a fateful job offer to Kurtzman in 1955.

Kurtzman's last regular editorial position of note was at the helm of Warren Publishing's Help! from 1962 to 1966. Relying heavily on photography, Help! gave the first national exposure to certain artists and writers who would dominate underground comix later on, such as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. The magazine also provided a brief forum for John Cleese and Terry Gilliam, who first worked together under Kurtzman's direction, years before Monty Python. In his 1985 film Brazil, Gilliam gave Ian Holm's character, the boss of protagonist Sam Lowry, the name "Kurtzmann". The assistant editor of Help! was Charles Alverson, who later collaborated with Gilliam on the screenplay for Jabberwocky (1977).

The most notorious article to appear in Help! was "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!", a ribald parody of Archie Comics that resulted in a lawsuit from Archie's publisher. Despite a talented roster of friends and contributors including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gloria Steinem and Gahan Wilson, along with the above names, the magazine folded after 26 issues.

Kurtzman's career remained eclectic. His Little Annie Fanny began its 26-year run in Playboy in 1962, though some admirers felt it was "known more for its lavish production values than its humor." He co-scripted the animated film Mad Monster Party, which was released in 1967. In 1972, Kurtzman produced several animated shorts for Sesame Street, and that same year he appeared in a Scripto TV commercial drawing Little Annie Fanny on the wall of a prison cell. A series of reprint projects and one-shot efforts appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.

In his later years, Kurtzman continued to work on anthologies and various other projects, as well as teaching a cartooning class at the School of Visual Arts. Beginning in 1988, the Harvey Awards, named for Kurtzman, were first given to the year's outstanding comics and creators. In the years before his death, Kurtzman returned to Mad for a brief stint, along with long-time collaborator Will Elder. Their pages were simply signed "WEHK".

In the end, Kurtzman's critical reputation has outlasted his career valleys and the formulaic or disappointing projects. He is routinely celebrated for his visual verve and artistic successes and is often cited as a key influence by many leading cartoonists. In its much-critiqued 2000 list of the century's Top 100 comics, The Comics Journal awarded Kurtzman five of the slots:

• 8. Mad comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
• 12. EC's "New Trend" war comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
• 26. The Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman
• 63. "Hey Look!" by Harvey Kurtzman
• 64. "Goodman Beaver" by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder

Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth is effusive in describing Kurtzman's style:

"[It] achieves some sort of Platonic ideal of cartooning. Harvey was a master of composition, tone and visual rhythm, both within the panel and among the panels comprising the page. He was also able to convey fragments of genuine humanity through an impressionistic technique that was fluid and supple.”

In 2009, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, a comprehensive 256-page survey of Kurtzman's drawings, paintings, comic strips, graphic stories, comic books, magazines and paperbacks, was published by Abrams. Written by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, the book includes both preparatory work and finished pieces. Kitchen said:

“Too often, especially with the collaborative work, Kurtzman’s contribution is quite literally unseen. Harvey was masterful with compositions and the interaction of figures. Since he often worked with brilliant cartoonists like Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Al Jaffee and others, it’s easy for a casual reader to assume they were responsible for the imagery and Harvey ‘just wrote’ or ‘just laid out’ the stories. By showing how complete and vigorous his layouts are, it’s much clearer that he was a true director of the finished work.”

Kurtzman died of liver cancer at age of 68 in February 21, 1993.

Along with Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware, Kurtzman was among the artists honored in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan from September 16, 2006 to January 28, 2007.