Howard Washington Odum (1884-1954) was a sociologist, educator, and academic administrator. He was the preeminent sociologist of the American South during the second quarter of the 20th century.

Howard W. Odum was born May 24, 1884, on a small farm near Bethlehem, Georgia. He graduated in 1904 from Emory College in Oxford, Georgia. From there he moved to Mississippi, where he taught in a rural school, earned an M.A. in classics in 1906 from the University of Mississippi, and found time to collect Black folk songs and folklore. He then went north for two Ph.D.'s, one at Clark University in 1909 under the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and one at Columbia in 1910 under the sociologist Franklin H. Giddings. Lasting influences of his doctoral studies included Wilhelm Wundt's folk psychology and William Graham Sumner's concept of the folkways. Odum's breadth of learning was a hallmark of his writings.

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