[1][2] Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service.

Poppe graduated from the Mongolian Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Petrograd University in 1921 where his main mentor was B.

During World War II Poppe lived in Mikoyan-Shakhar in the Caucasus, a region which was overtaken by the Germans.

In 1949, he managed to emigrate to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at the University of Washington.

In May 1989, a group of graduate students interested in Central and Inner Asian Studies initiated the first Nicholas Poppe Symposium.

He wrote manuals and grammars of written and colloquial Khalkha-Mongolian and Buriat-Mongolian, Yakut, the Alar dialect, and Bashkir.

Between 1949 and 1968 — a period during which he was teaching 16 to 17 hours a week at the University of Washington, with only three months in the summer for uninterrupted research — he wrote 217 works, including over 40 books.

This list of publications is based on "Nicholas Poppe Bibliography 1977–1982" by Arista Maria Cirtautas.