Henry Way Kendall was born on December 9, 1926, in Boston, Massachusetts, the oldest of three children. His parents were Henry P. Kendall, a businessman, and Evelyn Way Kendall. Kendall completed his secondary education at the Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts in 1945 and immediately entered the United States Merchant Marine Academy. He stayed at the academy one year before resigning in order to enroll at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Kendall decided to major in mathematics and earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1950. He conducted his graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded his Ph.D. in nuclear and atomic physics in 1954. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Kendall was appointed a research associate in a group headed by Robert Hofstadter at Stanford University's High Energy Laboratory.

At Stanford Kendall met two other researchers, Richard Taylor...