Largely self-educated, Goodrich became a bookseller and publisher at Hartford and later in Boston. There, beginning in 1828, he published for 15 years an illustrated annual, the Token, to which he was a frequent contributor both in prose and verse. The Token contained some of the earliest work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry W. Longfellow. Goodrich published Peter Parley's Magazine (1832–44) and then merged it into his Merry's Museum, founded in 1841 and for a time edited by Louisa May Alcott.

In 1827 he began, under the name of Peter Parley, his series of books for the young, which embraced geography, biography, history, science, and miscellaneous tales. He was the sole composer of comparatively few of these, but in his Recollections of a Lifetime, 2 vol. (1856), he wrote that he was “the author and editor of about 170 volumes,” of which about 7,000,000 copies had been sold, and gave a list both of the works of which he was the author or editor and of the spurious works published under his name. He was widely imitated, especially in England, where seven Peter Parleys held the field. Goodrich was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1836 and of the state Senate in 1837. In 1851–53 he was consul at Paris, where he remained until 1855.