Lankes grew up in Buffalo, New York, where he attend public and technical schools and was trained in mechanical drawing. He worked as a draftsman in a Buffalo plant and then for a patent attorney doing drawings of new inventions. Meanwhile, took correspodence courses in art and, at the age of 24, entered the Art Students League of Buffalo where he worked under Ernest Fosberg and Mary B. Cove. He then went to Boston where he studied at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts under William Paxton and Philip Hale (1912-13). He was primarily interested in painting during this period, but visits to Alfred Bartlett's art shop in Cornhill initiated an additional interest in prints. He earned his living during these years doing mechanical drawings for the inventor of an adding machine and for a tool designer in a sporting rifle factory. He also began to work in wood engraving, always doing his own printing, and from the beginning having a great sensitivity to types of wood and often taking his blocks directly from the tree.
In 1914 he married Edee Bartlet and the couple settled in the Buffalo area. His brother became very enthusiastic about his work and set up a press on which he published an edition of Lankes' woodcut book plates. His first exhibition, which originated at Goodspeed's Book Shop in Boston in September 1919, traveled to New York where it opened at the Flambeau Shops in time for the Christmas shopping season; it was received well. Another show at Goodspeed's in 1922 was followed by one at Weyhe Gallery in 1924. Meanwhile, Lankes' works were frequently appearing in magazines, primarily as illustrations for poetry and for literary essays. In 1923 his illustrations for Amy Lowell's poem "A Dracula of the Hills" was published.
Lankes taught art at Wells College, Aurora-on-Cayuga, New York from 1932 to 1940. He did the costumes and scenery for a production of Sophocles there in 1937 and, in that same year, the Wells College Club of Washington, D.C., sponsored an exhibition of his prints at the Corcoran Gallery.
During World War II, Lankes worked at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratorys as head of the illustration group. He designed murals, which illustrated the history of flying, for the rotunda of that institution's administration building.
The masterpieces of his career were the publications Virginia Woodcuts (1930); A Woodcut Manual (1932); and thirty illustrations for Grey's Elegy in a Courtyard (1940).
In 1951 Lankes moved from Hilton Head, Virginia, to Durham, North Carolina.
