SOURCE: "Society versus the Individual: Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, 1934," in Famous American Books, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971, pp. 290-97.

Downs is an American librarian and critic who has published a variety of works, including literary studies and several surveys examining books that have had a significant social influence. In the following essay, he discusses Benedict's approach to anthropology in Patterns of Culture.

For a serious and scholarly anthropological study to achieve sales in excess of a million copies was unheard of until the publication in 1934 of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. In hardback and paperback editions this extraordinary work has made publishing history by reaching best-sellerdom in the English language and in numerous translations.

There may be significance in the fact, too, that Ruth Benedict's student and close friend Margaret Mead is also the author of several extraordinarily popular and successful studies of primitive societies. The two writers...