[1] After graduating from Yale College in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics, DeFrancis sailed to China with the intent of studying Chinese and working in business.
In 1935, he accompanied H. Desmond Martin, a Canadian military historian,[2] on a several-thousand-mile trip retracing the route of Genghis Khan through Mongolia and northwestern China.
[3] His book In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan (University of Hawai'i Press, 1993) describes this journey riding camels across the Gobi Desert, visiting the ruins of Khara-Khoto and rafting down the Yellow River.
[7] He began his academic career teaching Chinese at Johns Hopkins University during the height of the Red Scare, and was blacklisted for defending his colleague Owen Lattimore from unsubstantiated allegations of being a Russian spy, and eventually laid off in 1954.
[5] DeFrancis spent his final years diligently working as Editor in Chief of the "ABC (Alphabetically Based Computerized) series" of Chinese dictionaries, which feature innovative collation by the pinyin romanization system.