Sauer, of German ancestry, was born in Warrenton, Missouri and graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in 1915.

Sauer graduated many doctoral students, the majority completing dissertations on Latin American and Caribbean topics and thereby founding the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography. The first generation consisted of Sauer's own students: Fred B. Kniffen (1930), Peveril Meigs (1932), Donald Brand (1933), Henry Bruman (1940), Felix W. McBryde (1940), Robert Bowman (1941), Dan Stanislawski (1944), Robert C. West (1946), James J. Parsons (1948), Edwin Doran (1953), Philip Wagner (1953), Brigham Arnold (1954), Homer Aschmann (1954), B. LeRoy Gordon (1954), Gordon Merrill (1957), Donald Innis (1958), Marvin W. Mikesell (1958), Carl Johannessen (1959), Clinton Edwards (1962), and Leonard Sawatzky (1967).

He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the American Geographical Society in 1935, and its Daly Medal in 1940.

Among them, Parsons remained at the University of California at Berkeley and became prolific in directing Latin Americanist doctoral dissertations. His doctoral students formed the second generation of the Berkeley School: Campbell Pennington (1959), william Denevan (1963), David Harris (1963), David Radell (1964), Thomas Veblen (1975), Karl Zimmerer (1987), Paul F. Starrs (1989), John B. Wright (1990), and David J. Larson (1994). Apart from Latin America, Parsons' Ph.D. students such as Alvin W. Urquhart (1962) also worked in Africa.

Denevan became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, in turn, produced a third generation: Daniel Gade (1967), Bernard Nietschmann (1970), Roger Byrne (1972), Roland Bergmann (1974), Billie Lee Turner II (1974), Gregory Knapp (1984), Kent Mathewson (1987), John M. Treacy (1989), and Oliver Coomes (1992). Mikesell became a professor at the University of Chicago and also produced a third generation.

A member of the fourth generation, william E. Doolittle studied with Turner, earned the Ph.D. in 1979, became a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at University of Texas at Austin, and has extended the school into the fifth generation: Dean P. Lambert (1992), Andrew Sluyter (1995), Emily H. Young (1995), Eric P. Perramond (1999), Phil L. Crossley (1999), Jerry O. (Joby) Bass (2003), Maria G. Fadiman (2003), and Matthew Fry (2008).

Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career. He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history." This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world. He drew on the work of Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and was influenced by German Latin Americanist geographer Oskar Schmieder—a disciple of Hettner—, and later critics accused him of introducing a "superorganic" concept of culture into geography. Politically Sauer was a conservative, but expressed concern about the way that modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health of the world. He believed that agriculture, and domestication of plants and animals had an effect on the physical environment.