Goffman was born in the Canadian village of Mannville, Alberta, in 1922, and raised in Dauphin, Manitoba. He was the younger brother of actress Frances Bay. He originally graduated from the University of Manitoba with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. Later, while he was working for the National Film Board in Ottawa, he developed his interest in sociology. It was also during this time that he met Dennis Wrong who was a renowned North American sociologist at the time. This meeting worked as a motivation to leave Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a B.A. in sociology and anthropology in 1945. Afterwards, he moved on to the University of Chicago and received his M.A. and Ph.D for sociology, in 1949 and 1953 respectively.

Along with many other sociologists of his cohort, Goffman was heavily influenced by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer in developing his theoretical framework. Goffman studied at the University of Chicago with Everett Hughes, Edward Shils, and W. Lloyd Warner. He would go on to pioneer the study of face-to-face interaction, or micro-sociology, elaborate the "dramaturgical approach" to human interaction, and develop numerous concepts that would have a massive influence.

Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his formulation of symbolic interaction as dramaturgical perspective in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which begins with an epigraph by George Santayana about masks. Largely working within the tradition of symbolic interactionism, he greatly elaborated on its central concepts and application. For Goffman, society is not homogeneous. We must act differently in different settings. The context we have to judge is not society at large, but the specific context. Goffman suggests that life is a sort of theater, but we also need a parking lot and a cloak room: there is a wider context lying beyond the face-to-face symbolic interaction. "Throughout Presentation of Self, Goffman seems to perceive the individual as nothing more than a cog responsible for the maintenance of the social world by playing his or her part. In fact, he refers to the self as a 'peg' upon which 'something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time.'"

Author of the rigorous, then-controversial, and highly influential text Asylums, for which he gathered information at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., he describes "institutionalization" as a response by patients to the bureaucratic structures and mortification processes of total institutions such as mental hospitals, prisons, and concentration camps. The NIMH tried to persuade Goffman not to publish his book because of its criticism of mental institutions . He always considered himself a social scientist, and did not use phenomenology or postmodernism as his major epistemological approach. He also was a sociologist who emphasized that "society always comes first".

He also wrote Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior,Forms of Talk and many other books and essays. Many of his works form the basis for the sociological and media studies concept of framing.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

This was Goffman’s first and most famous book, for which he received the American Sociological Association’s MacIver award in 1961. It was also the first book to treat face-to-face interaction as a subject to study in the sociological aspect. Goffman treated it as a kind of report in which he frames out the theatrical performance that applies to face-to-face interactions. He believed that when an individual comes in contact with other people, that individual will attempt to control or guide the impression that others might make of him by changing or fixing his or her setting, appearance and manner. At the same time, the person that the individual is interacting with is trying to form and obtain information about the individual. Goffman also believed that all participants in social interactions are engaged in certain practices to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others. This led to Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis. Goffman saw a connection between the kinds of acts that people put on in their daily life and theatrical performances. In social interaction, like in theatrical performance there is a front region where the “actors” (individuals) are on stage in front of the audiences. This is where positive aspect of the idea of self and desired impressions are highlighted. There is a back region or stage which can also be considered as a hidden or private place where the individual can be themselves and get rid of their role or identity in society.

Interaction Ritual

This book is a collection of six of Goffman’s essays; the first four essays were published around the 1950s, the fifth is published in 1964, and the last essay was to finish the collection. His six essays are “On Face-work”, “Embarrassment and Social Organization”, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”, “Alienation from Interaction”, "Mental Symptoms and Public Order” and “Where the Action Is”. Goffman's first essay, “On Face-work, focused on the concept of face, which is the positive image of self that individuals have when interacting with others. Goffman believed that face “as a sociological construct of interaction, is neither inherent in nor permanent aspect of the person”. Once an individual gives out a positive self image of themselves to others they then feel a need to keep or live up to that set image. When individuals are inconsistent with how they project themselves in society, they risk being embarrassed or discredited, therefore the individual remains consistently guarded, making sure that they do not show themselves in an unfavorable way to others.

Frame Analysis

This book was Goffman's way of trying to explain how conceptual frames structure the individual’s perception of the society; therefore, this book is about organization of experiences rather than organization of society. Frames organize the experiences and guide action for the individual and/or for everyone. Frame analysis, then, is the study of organization of social experiences. One example that Goffman used to help people better understand the concept is associating the frame with the concept of a picture frame. He used the picture frame concept to illustrate how people use the frame (which represents structure) to hold together their picture (which represents the context) of what they are experiencing in their life. The most basic frames are called primary frameworks. These frameworks take an experience or an aspect of a scene of an individual that would originally be meaningless and make it to become meaningful. One type of primary framework is natural frameworks, which identifies situations that happened in the natural world, and is completely physical with no human influences. The other type of framework is social framework, which explains events and connects it to humans. An example of natural framework would be the weather and an example of social framework would be the meteorologist who reports people with the weather forecast. Goffman concentrates more on the frameworks and tries to “construct a general statement regarding the structure, or form, of experiences individuals have at any moment of their social life”.

During his lifetime he was awarded the following:

• Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), University of Manitoba, 1976
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1977—78
• In Medias Res, International Prize for Communicating, 1978
• Doctor of Hebrew Literature/Letters (D.H.L.), University of Chicago, 1979
• Mead-Cooley Award in social psychology
• Forms of Talk was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, 1981

During his career Goffman served at the following institutions:

• University of Chicago, Division of Social Sciences, Chicago, assistant, 1952—53, resident associate, 1953—54
• National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, visiting scientist, 1954—57
• University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1958—59, associate professor, 1959—62, professor of sociology, 1962—68
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, 1969—82

He was also the 73rd president of American Sociological Association