author
Margaret Mead
1901–1978
A pioneering cultural anthropologist who brought the study of everyday life to a wide audience, she became one of the best-known public thinkers of the twentieth century. Her writing on adolescence, gender, and culture helped spark lasting conversations far beyond academia.
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About the author
Born in Philadelphia in 1901, she studied at Barnard College and earned graduate degrees at Columbia University, where she was influenced by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Her early fieldwork in the South Pacific led to Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the book that made her famous and introduced many readers to anthropology.
Over the decades, she wrote widely on culture, child-rearing, gender, and social change, and she became an unusually visible scholar in American public life. She also worked for many years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, helping connect museum research with a broader audience.
Mead died in 1978, but her work continues to be discussed for both its influence and its controversies. Even so, her gift for showing that human behavior is shaped by culture as well as biology made her one of the defining anthropologists of her era.