A native of New York City, Gleick attended Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Crimson, graduating in 1976 with an A.B. degree in English and linguistics.

He moved to Minneapolis and helped found an alternative weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise a year later, he returned to New York and in 1979 joined the staff of The New York Times. He worked there for ten years as an editor on the metropolitan desk and then as a science reporter. Among the scientists Gleick profiled in the New York Times Magazine were Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.

He wrote the "Fast Forward" column in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999, and his essays charting the growth of the Internet formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, reported the development of the new science of chaos and complexity. It made the butterfly effect a household term, introduced the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry to a broad audience, and sparked popular interest in the subject, influencing such diverse writers as Tom Stoppard (Arcadia) and Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park).^[12][13]

After the publication of Chaos, he collaborated with photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which John Banville said would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come."^[14]

Gleick's writing style has been described as a combination of "clear mind, magpie-styled research and explanatory verve."^[15] In 1989–90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. In 2000 he was the first editor of The Best American Science Writing series. Gleick was elected president of the Authors Guild in 2017.

As a reaction to poor user experience with procmail configuration at Panix, in 1993 Gleick founded The Pipeline, one of the earliest Internet service providers in New York City.^[16] The Pipeline was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface, incorporating e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web, through software for Windows and Mac operating systems.^[17][18]

Gleick and business partner Uday Ivatury licensed the Pipeline software to other Internet service providers in the United States and overseas. In 1995 Gleick sold The Pipeline to PSINet, where it was later absorbed into MindSpring and then EarthLink.^[19][20]

On 20 December 1997 Gleick was attempting to land his Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, New Jersey, when a build-up of ice in the engine's carburetor caused the aircraft engine to lose power and the plane landed short of the runway into rising terrain.^[21] The impact killed Gleick's adopted eight-year-old son, Harry, and left Gleick seriously injured.^[22][23]

• James Gleick, "The Fate of Free Will" (review of Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton University Press, 2023, 333 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 1 (18 January 2024), pp. 27–28, 30. "Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. Artificial intelligences – disembodied, strangers to blood, sweat, and tears – have no occasion for that." (p. 30.)
• James Gleick, "The Prophet Business" (review of Glenn Adamson, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, Bloomsbury, 2024, 336 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXII, no. 3 (27 February 2025), pp. 6, 8, 10. "[Glenn] Adamson, having exposed... strains of failed futurology, suggests nonetheless that we... should continue to make our best guesses... always remembering that every prediction is a statement about the present... For... fourteen years, Wikipedia has included a[n] entry titled 'Timeline of the Far Future'... An editor responsible for one recent addition justified it with the comment, 'Adds a bit of hope.' A different editor deleted it a few seconds later." (p. 10.)

• James Gleick's website with selections of his work.
• James Gleick, author page in The New York Review of Books.
• A Miracle Made Lyrical, Christopher Lydon interview with James Gleick.
• The Narrative Thread, James Gleick talks with Robert Birnbaum on Identity Theory (webzine).
• Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, article on the culture of Wikipedia.
• Audio: James Gleick in conversation with Janna Levin at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008.
• 'Science writer James Gleick explains the physics that define new media in the ongoing communications revolution' by Peter Kadzis, interview in the Boston Phoenix, April 6, 2011.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Time Travel.
• Gleick on Mastodon