Constellation Similarity Assertions

Geoffrey Gorer (1905-85) was born in London of well-to-do parents. Educated at Charterhouse and Jesus College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1927 with a degree in classics and modern languages. Periods of study at the Sorbonne (1922-1923) and at the University of Berlin (1927-1928) fostered an interest in other cultures which was to become the principal unifying theme of his career. However for the next few years Gorer saw himself as primarily an imaginative writer. Only after completing a picaresque novel and several unacted plays was he to conclude that his future lay elsewhere than in a purely literary career.

Gorer's first published work, The revolutionary ideas of the Marquis de Sade (1934), was an outgrowth of his burgeoning interest in abnormal psychology as much as of a training in modern languages. The book enjoyed a considerable critical success but was again something of a false start, since its author was not by constitution a scholar and in later life was to be only an occasional literary critic. His real talent surfaced almost by accident, when a three-month visit to West Africa in 1934, undertaken on impulse, resulted not only in a second successful book, Africa dances (1935), but also in the forming of a lifelong attachment to the science of social anthropology.

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