Gordon W. Allport was born in Kingston, New York, on June 6th, 1907. He attended the College of the City of New York, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in English in 1929. He then entered Columbia University's Graduate School of Business Administration, where he received his M.B.A
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in 1930. After graduation he joined the investment firm of Kidder Peabody in New York. In 1932, he married Agnes Swartwout, with whom he had four children.
They remained together until her death in 1997. Allport's first book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1943), introduced his theory of unconscious motivation through the concept of ego identity - the psychological space that surrounds each human being and which is composed of uniquely personal characteristics that are neither conscious nor consciousizable at any other time during life. The book was an immediate success, selling more than 200,000 copies within six years.
It has since been translated into more than twenty languages and remains one of his most popular books to this day; 400 million copies have been sold worldwide since its publication in 1947. His second book, The Individual and His Society (1949), is a classic statement on social psychology and has also gone through numerous translations and revisions over the past fifty years; it has sold about 2 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1950. Its central theme is that society shapes the individual but that the individual shapes society; this concept is expressed through countless references throughout both books throughout their respective pages.