He graduated from Kansas State University in 1930, then received a master's degree and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard in 1933 and 1936.
Kimball did groundbreaking anthropology work concerning family and community in rural Ireland (with Conrad Arensberg) and on the Navajo reservation in the American Southwest.
While in Alabama in the 1950s, Kimball studied social tension arising from racial segregation and found himself labelled an "academic radical."
Kimball was a founding member of the Society for Applied Anthropology, president of the American Ethnological Society, and he was instrumental in the establishment in 1978 of the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship Award Fund, which honors outstanding African-American graduates in the field of anthropology.
The American Anthropological Association now administers a Solon T. Kimball Award every other year to an anthropologist that effects change in public policy.