Robert F. Murphy

(1924 - 1990)

After serving in the navy, Robert F. Murphy attended Columbia University on the GI Bill and earned a PhD in anthropology. His early fieldwork among the Munduruku of the Amazon led to his first book, Women of the Forest, cowritten with his wife, Yolanda Murphy. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to Columbia in 1963; he remained there until his retirement in 1990. At age fifty-two he was diagnosed with a spinal tumor that eventually caused quadriplegia, an experience he recounted in the book The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled.