Claude Lévi-Strauss : The Poet in the Laboratory

The first comprehensive biography of ‘the father of modern anthropology''

‘An intellectual biography that briskly and brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and their origins in the context of Lévi-Strauss''s life from the 1930s to the 1960s in Brazil, New York and Paris'' The Times, Biographies of the Year

‘Lays out the life with clarity, efficiency, readability and occasionally dissent ... A superbly thrilling life'' Guardian

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the ‘father of modern anthropology'' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist theories.

Lévi-Strauss''s bohemian childhood and later studies of the emerging discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led him to mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe. Tracing the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man himself, research into his archives and conversations with contemporary anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Lévi-Strauss''s theories, revealing an artiste manqué who infused his academic writing with an artistic and poetic sensibility.