Martha Warren Beckwith

Martha Warren Beckwith was born on 19 January 1871 in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts, and grew up on Maui, in Hawaii. A pupil of Franz Boas at Columbia, she received her doctorate in 1918 and in 1920 took charge of the folklore foundation created at Vassar, the first chair of that discipline in an American university. She did fieldwork in Jamaica between 1919 and 1922, among the Sioux and the Mandan of the Dakotas and in Hawaii, was president of the American Folklore Society in 1932 and 1933, and devoted her last years to Hawaiian texts. She died in Berkeley in January 1959.

In the catalogue 1

• TaleJamaica Anansi StoriesMartha Warren Beckwith · 1924Literature