Albert Craig was born in Chicago on December 9, 1927, to Adda Clendenin Craig and Albert Morton Craig. At age 10, Craig lost his father to a heart attack. Family finances were straitened, but he won a swimming scholarship to Northwestern University. There, he set a national swimming record for freshmen.

In 1946 he was drafted. Stationed in Kyoto, he found time to visit temples and practice judo and met Teruko Ugaya, whom he would marry in 1953. Returning home, he graduated Northwestern in philosophy in 1949.

Awarded one of the earliest Fulbright fellowships, he studied economic history at the University of Strasbourg for a year and Japanese language and history at Kyoto University from 1951 to 1953, while earning a fourth-degree black belt in judo. He then pursued a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages at Harvard, which he completed in 1959. He immediately took a position as assistant professor in the Department of History, where he taught until his retirement in 1999. 

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