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Inventing Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport (1897-1967) to reveal the history of the personality category he championed. Drawing on an extensive array of previously unpublished biographical materials, Nicholson combines biography with intellectual history to reveal the ways in which Allport's science was embedded in the cultural politics of America in the 1920s and the 1930s. He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Carefully highlighting Allport's complex commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of ""personality"" in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that ""personality's"" appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and feminine; and freedom and control - categories rendered unstable in a new and distinctively modern age.

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• Illustrations(p. vii)
• Acknowledgments(p. ix)
• Chapter 1. Introduction(p. 3)
• Chapter 2. "Fine Character and Splendid Ideals": Allport's Early Years (1897-1915)(p. 13)
• Chapter 3. A New World: Harvard (1915-1919)(p. 29)
• Chapter 4. The Missionary Life: Robert College, Constantinople (1919-1920)(p. 55)
• Chapter 5. A Science of Personality: Graduate School (1920-1922)(p. 73)
• Chapter 6. A Psychology of the Spirit: Germany and England (1922-1924)(p. 103)
• Chapter 7. Constructing a Category: Personality Psychology at Harvard and Dartmouth (1924-1930)(p. 133)
• Chapter 8. The Politics of Moderation: Personality Psychology at Harvard (1930-1936)(p. 163)
• Chapter 9. Personality and Social Crisis (1937-1938)(p. 191)
• Chapter 10. Conclusion(p. 219)
• Notes(p. 227)
• Bibliography(p. 265)
• Index(p. 283)
• About the Author(p. 301)

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CHOICE Review

Nicholson (St. Thomas Univ., Canada) has written an intriguing, poignant, and well-paced portrayal of Allport. Part biography and part history of the field of personality psychology, the book provides a fascinating look at Allport's dominant influence and of his formidable work in the discipline. Nicholson traces the historical influences that factored into Allport's thinking, discusses how Allport's enduring influence in the field of psychology had a great deal to do with his impact on his students, and considers the often-disparate ideas that Allport folded into his developing theories. The text succeeds in documenting both the significance and the scope of Allport's work, while demonstrating the multiple influences (political, cultural, social) that influenced the emerging discipline of personality psychology. Nicholson solidly delineates the sometimes-subtle changes in the developing science of personality psychology as Allport made changes in his own career. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty who work with the history of psychology, and personality psychologists. R. E. Osborne Southwest Texas State University