Inventing Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport (1897-1967) to reveal the history of the personality category he championed. Drawing on an extensive array of previously unpublished biographical materials, Ian A. M. Nicholson combines biography with intellectual history to reveal the ways in which Allport's science was embedded in the cultural politics of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. This book will be invaluable to scholars and practitioners interested in personality, and it will serve as a model of scientific biography.