Edward Sapir Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir is remembered primarily as the most distinguished American-Indian linguist of his generation. Like many other social scientists of his day, however, Sapir dabbled in belles lettres and applied insights gained from aesthetic pursuits to his more conventionally academic work. He published more than two hundred poems in periodicals (approximately half of those extant in manuscript and in the possession of the Sapir family) and one volume of poetry; he wrote numerous reviews of poetry, and his interest in musical performance and composition led to several significant papers on the general nature of patterning. Sapir's poetry, however, has not been anthologized, as was that of his contemporary, friend, and fellow anthropologist Ruth Benedict (who wrote under the pseudonym of Anne Singleton). In retrospect his most significant contribution to literature may well have been his role in Ottawa social and scientific circles as a poet and supporter of the arts. Indeed, the vast majority of Sapir's aesthetic pursuits were carried out during his fifteen-year tenure as director of the anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada (1910-1925).

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