As a newly minted Ph.D. psychologist, Maslow returned to his native New York City at an opportune time.

His mentors there included leading European social scientists who had fled Hitler's Germany.

Maslow also became close with American-born anthropologist Ruth Benedict and her associate Margaret Mead.

Maslow and Mead both offered an optimistic view of human potential individually and societally.

If you're feeling ambivalent about celebrating this Fourth of July, you're in good company. As Abraham Maslow's biographer, I've found no evidence that he specifically noted our nation's birthday. However, his famous colleague and friend, anthropologist Margaret Mead, did so on the momentous bicentennial in 1976. Like Maslow, Mead became a celebrity intellectual with a warm, genial persona; she emphasized social science as a path to creating a better world for people everywhere.

When 27-year-old Maslow returned to his hometown, New York City, in 1935 after gaining his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, he was immensely excited. Though prizing his training in experimental psychology, he had found it intellectually narrow. Many of his midwestern professors had been parochial—sometimes even xenophobic—in disparaging his interest in European thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Gestalt psychologists. Now, Maslow was free to pursue his own interests unfettered by academic........

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