Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, to American parents. During and after graduating from Yale University, Goodenough was a U.S. military meteorologist in World War II. He got a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. He became a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and later the head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. He was married to Irene Wiseman from 1954 until her death in 2016.