On September 15, 1925, Margaret Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct the fieldwork that would become Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928. She was twenty-four years old, had nine months of field funding, and was attempting to answer a question that American psychology and anthropology had largely assumed was settled: whether the turbulence of adolescence was biological or cultural.

Mead was born in 1901 in Philadelphia, the daughter of a sociologist and an anthropologist. She studied under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia, where the emerging discipline of cultural anthropology was contesting the biological determinism that had dominated social science. Boas sent her to Samoa specifically to test whether adolescent conflict — assumed universal — existed in a culture structured differently from American society.

She spent nine months in Samoa, learned the language, conducted interviews with adolescent women, and concluded that Samoan adolescence was substantially less stressful than American adolescence, and that the cultural structures of Samoan society — its flexible attitudes toward sexuality, its extended family networks, its different relationship to achievement — explained the difference. The conclusion directly challenged the biological determinist position.

Coming of Age in Samoa sold over a million copies and became the best-selling academic anthropology book in American history. Critics attacked her methodology for decades. In 1983, after her death, Derek Freeman published a book arguing her informants had lied to her.

She also documented gender, sexuality, and social structure in Papua New Guinea, New Guinea, and Bali. She transformed how American social science thought about culture.