His Thomas Jefferson, The Apostle of Americanism (1929) and his Honest John Adams (1933) were acclaimed by critics as the most readable one-volume biographies of their subjects. Another major work was his L'Apotheosis de Benjamin Franklin, published in Paris in 1955. He wrote and edited more than forty books and published almost two hundred articles and reviews, mostly on Chateaubriand, Thomas Jefferson, and Frenchmen in America. He sent a copy of the bibliography of his writings that appeared in the Library Chronicle in 1965 to a former student inscribed: ``en souvenir d'un demisiecle de vagabondage litteraire.'' The ``vagabondage,'' a colleague later observed, expressed well Chinard's characteristics as a scholar: ``the extensiveness of his interests, the richness of his knowledge, the alertness of his imagination . . . the ease and grace with which he achieved new and lively insights. What he collected in his intellectual wanderings in the history of France and the United States will stand at the top of all research in Franco-American relations.''
His associates found him ``a man of great conviction, courage, and integrity, with a . . . keen wit and humor.'' They liked to recall his characteristically modest ``I discovered it tout … fait par hasard,'' which, one of them said, ``always announced a wondrously productive chance.''
Chinard was accorded signal honors both in America and in France. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America, a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a commander of the Legion of Honor, and a laureate of the French Academy. He was awarded Princeton's honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1959.