Author Description

The intimate personal story behind the pioneering achievements of the world's most famous anthropologist... Frankly and eloquently Dr, Mead relates here the events of her life up to World War Two and the effects each of her remarkable experiences has had on her as a woman. After childhood and school days in Pennsylvania and one year at DePauw University in Indiana, the scene shifts to Barnard College in New York. There, under the influence of anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, the seeds of Margaret Mead's lifelong career were planted. Involvements, reactions, influences - in these ways people are seen to dominate events. Thus, the affectionate yet probing account of her family life as a young girl points up the particular influence of her strong-willed paternal grandmother and of her mother, a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Dr. Mead writes with equal candor of her three marriages, first in 1923 to Luther Cressman, then a student minister; in 1928 to Reo Fortune, a young New Zealand psychologist whom she met aboard ship while returning from Samoa; and, in 1936, to Gregory Bateson, an English anthropologist, who is the father of her only child, her daughter Catherine. Vividly described are Dr. Mead's early field trips - to Samoa, New Guinea, Bali - and the opposition she overcame as a very young woman studying alone the peoples of the South Seas, then an activity at once unprecedented and shocking to many.