Carl Loraine Withers was born on March 20, 1900, the youngest of five children. His parents, Sarah Virginia Adams Withers and Horace Smith Withers, settled in a small rural community near Sheldon, Missouri. During his formative years, Withers' family experienced economic hardship. Nevertheless, in 1918 they managed to raise sufficient funds for Withers to travel to Harvard University where he successfuly passed the entrance exam and received conditional acceptance as an English major. For unknown reasons, Withers withdrew from Harvard a year later and for a brief period worked as a field-hand in Ely, Nevada. In 1920 he returned to Harvard to complete his studies and graduated magna cum laude in 1922.

Following graduation, Carl Withers was associated with various academic institutions. In 1923 he taught English at Northwestern University followed by a brief teaching assignment at the College of William and Mary. In 1925 Withers was appointed director of the English Department at Deerfield Academy. He left the position after receiving a fellowship from the Scandinavian-American Foundation at the University of Copenhagen. Over the next two years he traveled and studied in Europe. When he returned to the U.S. in January 1927, he held two part-time teaching positions at New York University (Washington Square College) and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1929, Withers left academia to work as an editor for the Grolier Society in Kansas City, Kansas. This editorial position was the first of several positions he held with the company. While employed by Grolier, Withers acquired knowledge of anthropology through the influential works of A.L. Kroeber and Charles W. Wagley. In 1935 he enrolled in Columbia University's graduate anthropology program. Four years later he secured financial grants that enabled him to conduct a field study in Wheatland, Missouri. Following completion of the project in 1940, and prior to the publication of his findings, Withers resumed teaching at Brooklyn College. His findings were published in 1945 as Plainville, U.S.A. under the pseudonym James West.

In 1947 Withers returned to the Grolier Society's New York office as an editor-in-chief. His major accomplishment during this period was the publication of a ten-volume reference work Lands and Peoples, specifically created for young adults. Withers' second major accomplishment that year involved a successful proposal to conduct field studies in Cuba. Under the auspices of the Viking Fund and the American Philosophical Society, he traveled to Cuba in the summer of 1948, visiting both Mayajigua, Los Villas, situated on the north central coast of Cuba, and Trinidad, a city in central Cuba noted for its colonial architecture.

In the fall of 1948, Withers returned to the U.S. and accepted the position of Research Associate at Yale University's Department of Student Health. Working with Ralph Linton, his former graduate advisor at Columbia University, Withers organized studies focusing on the psychological stress experienced by undergraduates. The resulting publication, which Withers co-authored with Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, and Cora Du Bois, was published as Psychological Frontiers of Society.

Between 1949 and 1950, Withers returned to Mayajigua and expanded his field studies to include several other regions. He returned to the U.S. in 1950, intent on organizing the Cuban materials for publication. However, in 1952, a grant from the American International Association allowed him to travel to Venezuela, where he taught vocational skills in select schools for a year. In 1953 Withers accepted the position of visiting professor at the University of Brazil. While there, he conducted a field study of Arraial do Cabo, a coastal fishing village, as part of field work training for the employees of the National Museum of Brazil.

In 1956 Withers received a grant from the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) to complete the Cuban manuscript, but after three years the work was still incomplete. In 1959 he accepted the position of Social Science Research Analyst at the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW). In September 1960, with the financial support of DHEW and additional grants from the Ford Foundation and RISM, Withers launched a pilot study on American teen culture in St. Louis, Missouri. Through an arrangement with DHEW, Withers served as a visiting professor at Washington University in Missouri for the length of the study.

In the final years of his life, Carl Withers' long-standing interest in children's folklore dominated his time. His first book in the genre was the classic Rocket in My Pocket, published in 1948. By the mid-1960s 70,000 copies of the book had been sold.

In 1969 Withers' health began to decline, prompting his decision to transfer the Cuban materials to RISM. He died of a stroke in his Greenwich Village home on January 5, 1970.

Sources:

Jablow, Joseph. "Carl Withers." American Anthropologist. 74 (1973): 764-769.Hopkins, Frank Snowden. Carl Withers, A Memoir for his friends. August 1972 [unpublished manuscript]