Glickman was born in Wichita, Kansas on November 24, 1944, the son of Gladys A. (née Kopelman) and Milton Glickman. His family was Jewish. The Glickman family operated Glickman Inc., a full-service scrap metal operation, since 1915 and Kansas Metal, an automobile and appliance shredder, since 1994. Glickman Inc. was founded by Jacob Glickman and later continued and expanded by Milton and Bill Glickman. With the death of Milton Glickman, Dan’s father, in December 1999, Dan and his siblings Norman and Sharon Glickman carried on the family business until it was sold in 2002.

Glickman graduated from Wichita Southeast High School in 1962. He graduated from University of Michigan with a B.A. in History in 1966, where he was a classmate with one of Al Gore’s Chiefs of Staff, Charles Burson, and received his J.D. from The George Washington University Law School in 1969. He is married to Rhoda Joyce Yura, with whom he has two children: Jonathan Glickman and Amy Glickman.

In 1969 and 1970, Glickman worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, then was a partner in a law firm, Sargent, Klenda and Glickman.

Glickman was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Kansas’s 4th congressional district in 1976, serving from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 1995, through eight successive re-elections.

In 1976, in his first congressional race, Glickman was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat from Kansas’s 4th congressional district—defeating eight-term Republican incumbent Garner Shriver. Glickman held the office for nine consecutive terms.

In 1986, Glickman was one of the managers appointed by the House of Representatives in 1986 to conduct the impeachment proceedings against Harry E. Claiborne, judge of the United States District Court for Nevada.

In 1993, he was appointed chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the One Hundred Third Congress, serving one term before his 1994 defeat.

In October 1993, Glickman, representing a district whose second-largest industry was agriculture (particularly wheat production), voted for protectionism over free trade, restricting the importation of Canadian wheat.

On “media freedom” versus “family values” one analyst reported that Glickman, in June 1993, voted to require that television shows have explicit viewer advisories. Glickman would later lead the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which develops such ratings for motion pictures.

On abortion, Glickman straddled the fence, generally accommodating abortion, but voting for the Hyde Amendment that restricted federal funding of abortion. In 1993, while on the House Judiciary Committee, he was absent from a key vote on removing most state abortion restrictions, and said later that he was unsure how he would have voted.

In 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced that Glickman would replace Jack Valenti as its chief lobbyist. Glickman served as Chairman and CEO of the MPAA from 2004 to 2012.

In the 2007 documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, Glickman was interviewed in connection with the 2006 raid on The Pirate Bay by the Swedish police, conceding that piracy will never be stopped, but stating that they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.

Glickman left the Motion Picture Association of America in 2010 to serve as president of Refugees International. He occupied the post for less than three months.

On January 22, 2010, Glickman announced he would step down as head of the MPAA on April 1, 2010.

The court-ordered redistricting in 2012 shifted the Fourth District sharply westward, reaching into more conservative Western Kansas.

As of 2017, no other Democrat has won election to the congressional seat lost by Glickman,