Ruth Benedict

Margaret Mead, America's most famous anthropologist, offers an intimate portrait of her long-time colleague and friend, Ruth Benedict. The first met when Mead was Benedict's student at Barnard in the 1920s; their professional association and their friendship were close and lasting. Beginning with Benedict's early life, Mead discusses her long struggle, as a woman, to attain an identity of her own, her early interests as a writer and poet, and her reasons for laying aside poetry for full-time scholarship. She grappled with the problems of a middle-class marriage and suburban household and…