Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd

Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd were a husband-and-wife team of American sociologists who collaborated on the Middletown books, which became classics of sociological literature as well as popular successes. The Lynds are said to have been the first to apply the methods of cultural anthropology to the study of a modern Western city.

Robert Lynd edited the trade magazine Publishers Weekly (1914–18) and later worked for book-publishing firms in New York City. He directed a sociological study of small cities for the Institute of Social and Religious Research (1923–26), served as an official of the Social Science Research Council (1927–31), and taught sociology at Columbia University (from 1931). He also was the sole author of Knowledge for What? (1939). On September 3, 1921, he and Helen Merrell were married. Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, New York) from 1929 to 1964, and her independent writings include On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958) and Toward Discovery (1965).

On the basis of field observations of social stratification in Muncie, Indiana, the Lynds wrote Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), innovatively treating the middle class as a tribe in the anthropological sense. Their follow-up study, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937), analyzed the social changes induced by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although no longer typical of American communities, Middletown (Muncie) is still the site of studies documenting social and cultural change in the United States.