Ruth Fulton Benedict--anthropologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and poet--is remembered today for her ability to popularize anthropology as cultural critique, her marriage of psychological studies and anthropology, her influential cultural relativist writings against racism, and her pioneering efforts in the "culture and personality" and the "applied anthropology" movements in anthropology.

Ruth Fulton Benedict was born 5 June 1887, in New York City, into an evangelical Protestant family that boasted ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. Benedict was the eldest daughter of Frederick Fulton, a doctor who died before Benedict's second birthday, and Beatrice Shattuck Fulton, a teacher who had graduated from Vassar College. After her father's death, Benedict's widowed mother was forced to take a series of jobs--teaching in New York City, Missouri, and Minnesota, and working as a librarian in Buffalo, New York. The difficulties of repeatedly moving as well as Benedict's profound deafness--the result of a childhood bout with...