Hargitai was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of nine he wrote his first poem “Rebels” meant as a tribute to the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After a daring escape, he arrived in America with his father, a royal judge before the Soviet occupation, his mother, and two brothers. Poems in his adopted language did not come until his university studies in Cleveland between 1965 and 1975 when he contributed occasional poems to the "Frigate" and the "Dark Tower", two literary magazines connected with Cleveland State University. Hargitai was twenty when he married Dianne Kress; they have two children.