1892-1970, 1896-1982
Sociologists

Pioneer Sociologists.

With their two groundbreaking studies of American life, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd helped found the field of modern sociology. Their research made available for the first time an in-depth account of how average Americans lived their daily lives during the 1920s.

Background.

Robert Staughton Lynd was born in New Albany, Indiana, and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from Princeton in 1914 and for four years served as the managing editor of Publishers' Weekly. Following a year of service in World War I, Lynd worked briefly for Charles Scribner's Sons and The Freeman Magazine before entering Union Theological Seminary. Helen Merrell was born in La Grange, Illinois, and attended Wellesley College, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1919. For two years she taught in girls' schools in New York...