As a child his family moved between Europe and Germany as his father conducted research on a Ph.D. As a result Goodenough developed an early interest in German and languages in general.
He majored in Scandinavian languages and literature, but was also influenced by the psychologist Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. and the anthropologist Lauriston Sharp.
He enrolled in graduate school at Yale University, but his studies were interrupted by World War II.
This research was designed to provide the American government basic information about Micronesia, which it had acquired from the Japanese at the end of the war.
Marshall and Caughey describe it as "the premier publication resulting from CIMA, one of the enduring classics of Pacific ethnography".
In 1951 conducted additional fieldwork in Kiribati, and in 1954 he organized a group of his graduate students on a collaborative ethnographic investigation of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea.
Throughout his career Goodenough continued to produce specialist ethnographic works on Micronesia, most notably a Trukese-English Dictionary (1990) and a monograph on pre-Christian religious traditions on Chuuk entitled Under Heaven's Brow (2002).