Encounter with an Angry God

Linguist-ethnographer John Peabody Harrington was an eccentric genius of American anthropology. It was in a summer class in 1915 that Carobeth Laird first met him, handsome and sun-tanned from the field. Her story of their seven-year marriage, written when she was in her seventies and published when she was eighty years old, is a compelling tale that has sold over 250,000 copies. In one sense a chronicle of what it meant to an anthropologist in the early twentieth century, it is also a love story, portraying the curious triangle that developed when a Chemehuevi informant entered the lives of Harrington and the young wife he drove as ruthlessly as he did himself.