Luther Carrington Goodrich was born on September 21, 1894, in Tongzhou, a southeastern suburb of Beijing, where his parents were serving as Protestant missionaries. His father, Chauncey Goodrich (b.1836), had published A Pocket Dictionary (Chinese-English) and Pekingese Syllabary in 1891 and among the nephews of Chauncey's great-grandfather Josiah (born 1731) were a US Senator and US Representative.

As a young child, he lived through the Siege of the International Legations in Beijing; he was able to remember some of these events even in his old age, when he must have been one of the last survivors.[1] He attended the Chefoo School in Yantai (Shandong), the Oberlin Academy in Ohio, and Williams College, from which he graduated in 1917. In 1918, soon after the United States entered World War I, Goodrich joined the US Army and was sent to France, where he worked with the Chinese Labour Corps in France, workers who were brought to France during the war, and were now participating in the post-war rebuilding of the country.[1]

In 1920, Goodrich started graduate work at Columbia University, but soon left for China, where he worked for the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. Back at Columbia in 1925, he received his master's degree in 1927 and Ph.D. in 1934. Continued at Columbia as a faculty member, attaining the rank of full Professor in 1945.[1] Excluding a few short breaks spent as a visiting professor in institutions abroad (as far as Santiniketan in India, Japan, and Australia), he spent the rest of his career at Columbia University; even after his retirement from teaching, he still remained associated with Columbia as Dean Lung Professor Emeritus of Chinese.[1]

During his academic career, Goodrich published a number of works on Chinese history. In 1956–1957, he was President, Association for Asian Studies" (WIKI)