Mead was educated at Oberlin College, graduating in 1883. He subsequently studied at Harvard, Leipzig and Berlin. From 1891 he worked at Michigan, where he became the friend and collaborator of John Dewey, under whose aegis he moved to Chicago in 1894. His influence was probably most pronounced in social psychology, where he attempted to show the origins of human personality and self-consciousness in processes of ‘symbolic interaction’, of both gestures and language. Mead never published a book, but his papers were collected in four volumes, The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Mind, Self, and Society (1934), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and The Philosophy of the Act (1938), Mead’s Carus Lectures of 1930.