William Lloyd Warner was born on October 26, 1898, in Redlands, California. He was the son of William Taylor, a rancher and engineer, and Clara Belle (Carter) Warner. He attended San Bernadino High School until he joined the army in March 1917 and was discharged from his military duties the following year after contracting tuberculosis. Warner's early twenties were a time of unrest. He studied at the University of Southern California for one year before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley. At the University of California, he studied English and became active in the Socialist Party. Briefly married to Billy Overfield, probably from 1918 to 1921, he left California in 1921 to pursue an acting career in New York City. Failing to secure any acting work outside a few small parts, Warner returned to Berkeley to complete his studies.
Upon his re-admittance to the University of California, Warner developed a lifelong friendship with anthropology professor Robert H. Lowie, who encouraged Warner to pursue his bachelor's degree in anthropology. He also established close and lasting relationships with anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber and was deeply influenced by Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown during their visits to Berkeley. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown introduced Warner to the British functionalist approach to social anthropology. Graduating in 1925 with a bachelor's degree in anthropology, Warner traveled to northern Australia in 1927 on a Rockefeller Foundation and Australian National Research Council fellowship to pursue doctoral research among the Murngin people. During his two-year stay, Warner applied social anthropological methodology to the study of the Murngin's social and kinship organization. In 1937, Warner published A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, basically his doctoral dissertation, but he never defended it and he never received his doctoral degree.
Upon returning to the United States in 1929, Warner turned his attention to the study of contemporary society. While working on his graduate studies at Harvard University, he taught at Harvard, Radcliffe, and the Graduate School of Business Administration. He was also appointed to the Committee on Industrial Psychology. Working with behavioral scientist Elton Mayo, Warner studied the workplace structure and organization of the Western Electric Hawthorne plant in Chicago. His desire to apply his methodology to an entire community led Warner to his next, and most influential, project. Hoping to find a town small enough to handle the data collection but big enough to embody the major traits of contemporary American society, Warner located his new research project in Newburyport, Massachusetts. From 1930 to 1935, Warner and thirty assistants conducted extensive interviews, compiling research on 17,000 members of the small industrial town. Warner, himself, moved to Newburyport in 1932 and married a local resident, Mildred Hall. They had three children: Ann, Caroline, and William Taylor.
The comprehensive study, popularly called the "Yankee City Series," addressed the issues of class, community, factory life, ethnicity, and religious organization. Ultimately, Warner would be the primary author of the five-volume series: The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941; with Paul S. Lunt), The Status System of a Modern Community (1942; with Lunt), The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945; with Leo Srole), The Social System of the Modern Factory (1947; with J. O. Low), and The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959). The study received significant coverage by the media, adding to the influence of the research results. Well written, the series portrays typical American life as it is influenced by social, ethnic, religious, and work relationships. Working from the assumption that relationships determine personal identity, Warner developed a social scheme, still commonly in use, consisting of six ranks within the class system: upper, middle, and lower, with each being divided again into upper and lower. Although he was criticized as being ahistorical and too prone to generalization, Warner's social anthropological methodology of relating social personality to social structure heavily influenced continuing research in social stratification and social mobility.
In 1935, Warner became professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. During his twenty-five year tenure, he conducted numerous other community studies based on his Yankee City Series, focusing in particular on urbanization, ethnicity, and education. He served as a member of the Committee on Human Development from 1942 to 1959, and co-founded Social Research, Inc., in 1946, created as a means to apply social anthropologic research in such areas as marketing and human relations to the business world. In 1959 Warner moved from the University of Chicago to accept the position of University Professor of Social Research at Michigan State University in East Lansing, where he remained until his death in 1970. Warner produced numerous works during his career outside the Yankee City Series, including Structure of American Life (1952), Occupational Mobility in American Business and Industry, 1928-1952 (1955; with James C. Abegglen), and The Corporation in the Emergent American Society (1961).
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