We verify a long-standing conjecture on the membership of univalent harmonic mappings in the Hardy space, whenever the functions have a “nice” analytic part. We also produce a coefficient estimate for these functions, which is in a sense best possible. The problem is then explored in a new direction, without the additional hypothesis. Interestingly, our ideas extend to certain classes of locally univalent harmonic mappings. Finally, we prove a Baernstein-type extremal result for the function $\log (h'+cg')$, when $f=h+\overline {g}$ is a close-to-convex harmonic function, and c is a constant. This leads to a sharp coefficient inequality for these functions.