Craig was born on a farm near
Owensboro, Kentucky, to Robert and Mary Jane Craig,
nee McHenry. He earned his A.B. from
Centre College 1897, and served as principal at Stanford Academy in Kentucky for one year. He began graduate study in 1898 at Princeton University under
Thomas Marc Parrott, and took his M.A. in 1899 and his Ph.D. in 1901. During two summers he studied with
John Matthews Manly at the
University of Chicago, and studied at
Exeter College, Oxford, from 1901 to 1903. He returned to Princeton as an English instructor from 1903-1905, where he became one of
Woodrow Wilson's first group of Edgerstoune School preceptors from 1905 to 1910. From 1910 to 1919 he was a professor of English at the University of Minnesota. While there he took military leave for two years to serve in the Army as a second lieutenant in World War I. In 1919 Craig joined the English Department faculty at the University of Iowa, and the following year he was made head of the department. While there in 1922 he founded the
Philological Quarterly. In 1928 he left Iowa to go to Stanford University. He retired as Professor of English Emeritus at Stanford in 1942 at the age of 67, and then went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as visiting professor until 1949, at which time he accepted an appointment as visiting professor of English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, serving until his third retirement in 1960. He became Scholar-in-Residence at
Stephens College and then at Centre College until 1967, thus completing 65 years of teaching. Craig was a member of the executive committee of the
Modern Language Association of America. He was considered to be an authority on Shakespeare and
Milton. He was the recipient of two
festschrifts, the first,
Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hardin Craig, at the occasion of his retirement from Stanford University, and another,
Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig in 1960 to commemorate his third retirement, from the University of Missouri. He died in
Houston in 1968 at the age of 93. ==Selected works==