Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978), was an American anthropologist whose great fame owed as much to the force of her personality and her outspokenness as it did to the quality of her scientific work. Often controversial as an academic, her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. Coming of Age in Samoa, the first of her 23 books, is a perennial best seller and a characteristic example of her reliance on observation rather than statistics for data.