The autobiographical sketch with which Gordon Allport concludes this collection of his essays illustrates how closely the career of this brilliant scholar has paralleled the coming-of-age of American psychology. Characteristically, his self-portrait centers as much on the other great psychologists with whom he studied, worked, and argued as on Allport himself. But The Person in Psychology offers much more. Here are major essays on personality, personal growth, and prejudice collected in book form for the first time plus incisive interpretations of William Stern, William James, John Dewey, Karl Buhler, Kurt Lewin, and Richard Clarke Cabot.
Allport who died late in t967, shortly after completing the preparation of the manuscript for this volume was a former president of the American Psychological Association. In 1963, he was awarded the coveted Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation. His pacesetting work on personality and on intergroup relations (particularly prejudice and bigotry) had, in recent years, led him far beyond purely psychological concerns as the first occupant of the Richard Clarke Cabot Chair in Social Ethics at Harvard University, where he had taught for more than a generation.