Educated in Denver elementary schools and the University of Colorado, Jovanovich served in the United States Navy during World War II.
[citation needed] Unable to complete graduate study after the war, he joined the publisher Harcourt Brace and Company as a college textbook salesman.
When he retired 46 years later, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), had nearly 12,000 employees (6,300 in publishing, and the rest in entertainment and other divisions) and annual sales stood at more than $1.4 Billion.
[citation needed] Throughout the years Jovanovich presided over the steady expansion of HBJ's enterprises, acquiring other publishing firms and even purchasing several theme parks.
Jovanovich worked directly with a number of these writers, including Hannah Arendt, Charles Lindbergh, Milton Friedman, and Mary McCarthy.
During William Jovanovich's tenure the works of Sylvia Beach, Arthur C. Clarke, Edward Dahlberg, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Hiram Haydn, Helen Hayes, Irving Howe, Jerzy Kosiński, Stanisław Lem, Anita Loos, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Lewis Mumford, V. S. Pritchett, Erich Maria Remarque, Richard Rovere, Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, Vassilis Vassilikos, Andy Warhol, Leonard Woolf were published, and promoted were the works of Serbia's poet Matija Bećković, Serbian American professor Michael Boro Petrovich,[5] communist dissidents Milovan Djilas, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Vladimir Dedijer and Svetlana Alliluyeva, better known as Stalin's daughter.
In 1987, ten years after the move from New York, HBJ fell victim to a hostile takeover effort by Robert Maxwell, a man whom Jovanovich neither respected nor liked.