On creating a usable culture

"Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meaning of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them." "On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism."--BOOK JACKET.