Robert Staughton Lynd

Robert Staughton Lynd (September 26, 1892 – November 1, 1970) was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City.

From September 1920 to 1923 Lynd attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1923.

[3][7] In 1914 Lynd began working as an assistant editor at Publishers Weekly in New York City, before leaving in 1918 to serve in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War I.

[2][8][9] After the war Lynd was an advertising and publicity manager at Charles Scribner's Sons for about a year, then began work in 1920 as an assistant publisher for B. W. Huebsch, Inc. and joined the staff of the Freeman.

[2] In 1921 Lynd was a divinity student at Union Theological Seminary, and for a summer he work as a church missionary in Elk Basin, Wyoming, the site of several oil camps.

In 1923 Rockefeller agreed to let the Institute of Social and Religious Research hire Lynd as a director for its Small City Study.

[5][9][10] In 1924 Robert and Helen Lynd moved to Muncie, Indiana, to begin an eighteen-month study of daily life in this Midwestern community.

[13][14] Reviewers "praised its careful research and its scientific character," but the book's popularity was due to the coauthors' explanations of American life.

While teaching at Columbia, Lynd began but never completed sociological studies concerning the impact that the Great Depression had on segments of the population in Manhattan, New York, and in Montclair, New Jersey.

[3][17] After the publication of two books on the Middletown studies, Lynd resumed his academic career as a social scientist and professor at Columbia University.

[4] During the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert and Helen Lynd were the subjects of U.S. government investigations for alleged involvement in the Communist party.

[21][23] A seventh part of Middletown, "Seventeen" (1982), was judged too controversial to broadcast, as it focused on the world of high school seniors, portraying changing mores, language and sexuality.

[24] In Knowledge for What?, he argues that American culture holds outstanding and contradictory assumptions such as women being both "the finest of God's creatures" while also considered inferior to men in term of reasoning power.