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, 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).

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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.