He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War before returning to teach English and American literature first at the University of Vermont and then at Dartmouth College, Hanover, where he remained from 1963 to his retirement in 1997.
Loomis received a Smithsonian grant to go to Greenland, dig up Hall's body, take samples of the hair and fingernails, and send them for forensic analysis.
This research expedition inspired Loomis's well-known book, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer, published by Knopf in 1971.
A 2001 article by Sara Wheeler in the New York Times[3] notes: Chauncey Loomis [is an] accomplished writer ... and his “Weird and Tragic Shores,” recently reissued ... in the Modern Library’s Exploration Series, unravels the expedition brilliantly and also offers a concise and intelligent introduction to the history of Arctic exploration ... Loomis conjures flesh and blood from the flimsy old journals and lifts the story from the pincers of the pack ice into the warm, fathomless and infinitely more thrilling realm of the human spirit.The book has been maintained in print by the Modern Library and was the subject of a CBC television documentary in the early 1970s.
In 1996, Loomis, with art historian Constance Martin, annotated and wrote the introduction for an illustrated edition of Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853 by Elisha Kent Kane (R.R.
After his death, the Foundation received a $2 million bequest from his estate directed to a variety of education, health, social service, art and environmental organizations.