About the Author:
Anthropologist Margaret Mead, America's best-known woman scientist is a prolific writer, an indefatigable lecturer, a world traveler, and above all a trenchant observer of native cultures both at home and abroad. Her present position is that of associate curator of ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University. A graduate of Barnard (B.A. '23) and of Columbia (M.A. '24, Ph.D. '29), Dr. Mead holds six honorary degrees. She is president of the American Anthropological Association and a past president of the World Federation for Mental Health.
Dr. Mead spent many years among various South Seas peoples (and had to learn to use seven primitive languages). Out o£ her experience in Samoa came her first book, in 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa, which has become a classic among cultural studies and a best-seller as well (it is available in a paperback edition). She has written ten other books - not to mention those in which she has had a role as co-author or editor — all eminently readable as well as scholarly.
