Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the most influential French intellectuals of the 20th Century; he founded the structuralist school of anthropology in the 1950s.

Levi-Strauss’s books include Tristes Tropiques – a 1955 biographical book regarded as a classic – as well as The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked.

His death was announced in Paris by his publisher, Plon, on Nov. 3, 2009.

Levi-Strauss applied the structural approach pioneered by linguistics to anthropology, arguing that family relations and belief systems are best analyzed as complex sets of interrelated parts.