Leslie White (1900–75) was unquestionably one of the most important yet least understood figures of 20th-century anthropology. He evoked strong passions in both advocates and opponents, many of whom have written about him. William Peace has produced the first full-scale biography of this controversial figure, however, and it goes a long way toward elucidating the paradoxes (both apparent and real) in White's life and work. White's evolutionism, Peace notes, was the most radical early critique of Boasian anthropology, and although it went out of vogue even during White's lifetime, it changed the course of U.S. anthropology. An icon for the generation that came of age in the two decades after World War II and the guiding force behind the development of the powerful University of Michigan department, White ended his years isolated (though tended by some of his devoted former students), embittered, and alcoholic, meeting his death in a motel room with a much younger woman—an end his enemies might have envied.

Peace draws on extraordinarily rich sources, especially White's prodigious correspondence and the journals he kept for most of his life, some of which he unfortunately expurgated. (One can only regret the loss that future biographers will suffer in this electronic age.) Peace also mined White's field notes and his voluminous unpublished manuscripts, and he extended his research to many of the individuals with whom White was in contact, through both archival materials and interviews. A major discovery was White's extensive writings, from 1931 to 1945 under the pseudonym of John Steel, for the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). This lode yielded new insights into White's early and explicit Marxism and his conviction that anthropological theory could be used to address the ills of the world. White was later badly treated by the SLP, precipitating a break with the party. Given his politics, his disapproval of the 1960s activism that was so prominent on his own campus is curious.

Peace follows White's life story in search of explanations for the kind of anthropology he produced. Born to middle-class parents who subsequently divorced, White and his siblings were raised by their father on a farm in Kansas. He served in the Navy during World War I, an experience that awakened him to the evils of war and social injustice and threw into doubt the verities he had grown up with. His turn both to "revolutionism" and to social science took place during college years at Columbia. He went on to study anthropology at the University of Chicago, where his Ph.D. was held hostage to a departmental fissure. A brief encounter with the Menominee Indians sold him on fieldwork and (against his mentors' advice) he set off for Acoma, one of the most secretive of the pueblos. This was the beginning of 30 years of difficult, detailed ethnographic research on the Keresan pueblos—work that he did simultaneously with his seminal theoretical and political writings on evolutionism. White himself saw no contradiction between these endeavors.

White spent 40 years in the Michigan department, 25 of them as its chairman. Despite his inevitable influence on it, he always wanted to avoid its turning into a "school"; he sought diversity in the faculty and encouraged a democratic atmosphere unusual for academic departments of the time. Throughout the Michigan years, White fought his battle to bring evolutionism (and Lewis Henry Morgan) into anthropology, slaying Boasian dragons—single-handedly for a long time—in the harsh polemical style that earned him so many enemies. By the time of the Darwinian centennial in 1959, evolutionism was in the mainstream and he was vindicated, but he remained as combative as ever.

In tracing this trajectory, Peace effectively balances White's biography and his ideas, seeking connections between them and arguing that his anthropology cannot be understood apart from his political beliefs. Peace explores, to a greater extent than seen in most other biographies of anthropologists, the sociopolitical context of White's theories; he also tells of the price White paid for his ideas, first in attacks by the religious establishment and then in McCarthy-era FBI investigations. Although he clearly admires White (who died when Peace was in high school), he is careful to convey the unattractive aspects of White's personality and the extensive criticisms made of his work. The result is an illuminating portrait of a complex figure whose ideas were ahead of their time—one whose critical role in the recent history of anthropology has been too little appreciated as other theoretical currents have gained sway.