A wide-ranging intellect whose more than sixty books--including several non-fiction bestsellers--covered a vast array of topics, Ashley Montagu was an intellectual maverick often shunned by the academic community for his unorthodox ideas. Although an anthropologist by training, he nevertheless wrote about such diverse subjects as human anatomy, marriage, crying, swearing, and prehistoric man. Despite the eclecticism of his interests, Montagu maintained that there was a common theme to all of his work. "[My] major interest," he told an interviewer, "is the relation of cultural factors to the physical and behavioral evolution of man."

Ashley Montagu was born Israel Ehrenburg in the working-class East End section of London in 1905. Although claiming at times that his father was a successful stockbroker in London's financial district, Montagu was in fact the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland and his father was a tailor of modest means. In 1925, he graduated...