Robin Fox was born in the Brontë village of Haworth in the Yorkshire Dales, at the height of the depression in 1934. He had very little schooling during WWII, moving all over England with his soldier father, and his mother, then an army nurse. (See the dedication to Kinship and Marriage.) The Church of England, public libraries, and the BBC, substituted for school. Through a series of scholarships he made his way to the London School of Economics in 1953, and did his undergraduate degree in Sociology, including a heavy dose of Philosophy and Social Anthropology. He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations, and found himself in New Mexico studying language and society among the Pueblo Indians. He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti, on the Rio Grande, on which he wrote his Ph.D. thesis (published as The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology, 1967)

He returned to England where he taught for four years at the University of Exeter, starting fieldwork on Tory Island – a remote Gaelic-speaking community off the coast of Donegal in Ireland. This eventually resulted in his book The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe (1978), for which the University of Ulster awarded him a doctor of science (D.Sc.) degree. He then returned to the LSE for four more years, lecturing mainly on kinship, and producing the widely used text Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (1967.) After publishing what became a classic paper "Sibling Incest" in the British Journal of Sociology (1962), and under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby, David Attenborough, Robert Ardrey, Niko Tinbergen and Lionel Tiger, he became interested in Ethology – the science of the evolution of behavior.
He and Tiger wrote a paper on "The Zoological Perspective in Social Science" (1965) which was one of the first salvos in the great debate on the nature/nurture issue that was to flare up in the sixties and seventies. During this time he saw three daughters into the world (Kate, Ellie and Anne. See the dedication to Encounter with Anthropology.)

Rutgers University offered him a chair of anthropology in 1967, and the chance to start a new department, including Tiger. This has grown to be a major research department and graduate program. He and Tiger completed their joint work, The Imperial Animal, in 1970, a book that galvanized the nature/nurture debate and provoked a mix of enthusiasm and vituperation. In 1972, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, through its president Mason Gross, ex-president of Rutgers, made them joint Research Directors, and started a program of support for work particularly on violence and dominance. The list of their grantees is a Who's Who in the early development of what came to be known as Sociobiology. It also included such people as Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2003. They worked for twelve years with the Foundation, and during that time he produced several books including Encounter with Anthropology, Biosocial Anthropology (editor), The Red Lamp of Incest, and Neonate Cognition (edited with Jacques Mehler.)

During this same period he was a visiting professor at Oxford, Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), California at San Diego, and the Universitad de los Andes in Bogatá, Colombia, where he did a participant observer stint as a bullfighter. In 1985 Rutgers made him a University Professor, the highest honor it can give a faculty member. He wrote The Search for Society, his "equal time response" to the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and The Violent Imagination, a book of essays, verse, satire, drama and dialogue. He spent a semester at St. John's College, Cambridge, and wrote a series of related collections of his essays. The first was Reproduction and Succession, relating his part in both the appeal of a Mormon policeman to the Supreme Court, and the famous "Baby M" surrogate mother trials in New Jersey. Then followed The Challenge of Anthropology, and Conjectures and Confrontations. In 2001 he added significantly to the material in The Violent Imagination, plus a forward by his neighbor and friend Ashley Montagu, which came out as The Passionate Mind. He has published a number of papers on contemporary affairs in The National Interest – nationalism, the nature of war, the Northern Ireland problem, and a series of exchanges on human rights.

(This is me again.) The dry bones of biography do not convey the richness and excitement of a life lived between the two worlds of Europe and America, and amongst some of the most exciting ideas of the century. To try to capture some of this I have completed a memoir of the first forty years of my "accidental life," called Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (see Latest Book) Meanwhile I live in Princeton, New Jersey with my wife Lin, an ex-teacher of health sciences at Kean University. (See the dedication to The Passionate Mind.) We have a winter retreat on Sanibel Island in S. W. Florida, where I pursue a research interest in the archaeology of the Calusa Indians, as well as art (pastel and watercolor), fishing (badly), music including choral singing and classical guitar, wine (in an amateur way), and college football (passionate.) Lin works on her project to educate us on The Healthy House. Two of my daughters live and work in England. Kate has written a best seller: Watching the English. Anne runs Galahad SMS Ltd., a social-science research firm. Ellie lives in Lebanon with her husband and my (now) four grandsons, whom I miss terribly. (See the dedication to Reproduction and Succession.)

I am currently working on the relevance of evolutionary biology to the study of epic literature, and on animal dispersion and human sectarianism, and teaching courses on the history of anthropology, and comparative mythology. In response to the events of 9/11 I became an American citizen in 2002; better late than never. I am deeply fond of, and grateful to, the USA, (and especially Rutgers) for the chances and rewards it gave me, while never losing my affection for my native Britain. It’s good we are allies again; that's the best solution for a transatlantic man. I hope you enjoy my books. Thank you.