Like its predecessor volumes, Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, Volume IV offers provocative glimpses into the lives of early major psychological figures. Written by experts in salient subfields of psychology, this volume covers a whole range of disciplines, vividly depicting twenty-one preeminent men and women whose lives spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. Among those featured are Evelyn Hooker, who helped declassify homosexuality as a disorder and fueled the gay rights movement; Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology from an American university; and Roger W. Sperry, a Nobel Laureate and neuroscientist whose work sought to answer the question, What is consciousness?

The portraits shed new light on the contributions and personalities of giants in the field, often with a touch of humor. The animated style and carefully selected details make the people, ideas, and controversies in the history of psychology come alive in a way that a standard systematic text on,the history of psychology can rarely, if ever, achieve.