Lynd, Robert Staughton


Lynd, Robert Staughton,

1892–1970, American sociologist, b. New Albany, Ind.; grad. Princeton (B.A., 1914), Ph.D. Columbia, 1931. He taught at Columbia for 30 years (1931–61). With his wife, Helen Merrell Lynd, 1896–1982, b. La Grange, Ill., who taught at Sarah Lawrence College (1929–64), he authored two noted sociological studies of Muncie, Ind., Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). Lynd was active in labor and civil-rights movements, and wrote Knowledge for What? (1939).

Lynd, Robert Staughton

(1892–1970) sociologist; born in New Albany, Ind. Seminary trained, he began as a missionary in Montana and then turned to sociology and anthropology in the 1920s. He later taught at Columbia University (1931–60). In 1921 he married Helen Merrell, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. The first of their many collaborations was Middletown (1929), a landmark empirical study of urban American culture (actually Muncie, Ind.); with its 1937 sequel, this work was instrumental in bringing an anthropological perspective to the practice of contemporary sociology.