Robert Staughton Lynd was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 12, 1887. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1908, and became a teacher at the university. He held various teaching jobs until 1914, when he joined the U.S. Army as a private
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During World War I he became an aide to General Pershing, then commander of the AEF forces in France. After the war he obtained a Master's degree in English Language and Literature from Harvard University. In 1922 he joined the faculty of Columbia University as an associate professor of English, and he soon became well known as a critic and scholar of William Shakespeare.
In 1925 he published The Art of Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation and Debate (1925), an important study that was widely recognized as one of the most important books of its kind published during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1929 Lynd founded and became editor of The Yale Review . It was during this time that he also wrote his seminal work on American democracy: Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1941).