LYND, ROBERT (STAUGHTON); AND LYND, HELEN

born Sept. 26, 1892, New Albany, Ind., U.S. died Nov. 1, 1970, Warren, Conn. born March 17, 1894, La Grange, Ill. died Jan. 30, 1982, Warren, Ohio Helen Lynd ne Merrell American sociologists, husband and wife who collaborated on the Middletown books, which became classics of sociological literature as well as popular successes. They 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 (191418) 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 (192326), served as an official of the Social Science Research Council (192731), and taught sociology at Columbia University (from 1931). He was the sole author of Knowledge for What? (1939). He and Helen Merrell were married on Sept. 3, 1921. Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y. (192964), and her independent writings included On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958) and Toward Discovery (1965). On the basis of field observations of social stratification in Muncie, Ind., the Lynds wrote Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937). An innovation was the Lynds' treatment of the middle class as a tribe in the anthropological sense. Middletown in Transition is devoted to analyzing the social changes induced by the Great Depression of the 1930s.