He entered the public school system and graduated from the City College of New York in 1902.

In 1907 he returned to the United States and became a student of Franz Boas at Columbia, where he counted Edward Sapir and Robert Lowie among his classmates.

He engaged in years of productive fieldwork among the Winnebago (Hocąk) Indians, primarily from 1908 to 1912.

In 1929, as a result of his fieldwork, he was able to publish a grammar of the nearly extinct language of the Wappo people of the San Francisco Bay area.

His most enduring publication to date is The Trickster (1956), which includes essays by the pioneering scholar of Greek mythology, Karl Kerényi, and the prominent psychoanalyst C. G.