In 1925, Mead traveled to Samoa for the fieldwork that would become her first and still most famous book. She sought to discover whether adolescence was always marked by “storm and stress,” suggesting that these struggles were rooted in biology, or whether adolescence might proceed very differently in different societies, suggesting that human experiences were culturally constructed. Sexuality was the “sizzle” that made Coming of Age in Samoa so popular, but its argument in favor of cultural construction was even more significant, withstanding even decades-later attacks on Mead’s research. At the same time that Mead established her academic reputation, her first marriage faltered and she fell in love with a mercurial fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune. Her Christian faith was buffeted in this period, but she insisted that she never completely lost it.
