When Claude Levi-Strauss passed away in 2009 at age 100, France celebrated the life and contributions of not only a preeminent anthropologist, but one of the defining intellectuals of the 20th century. Just as Freud had shaken up the antiquarian discipline of psychiatry, so had Levi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology, transforming it from the colonial-era study of exotic tribes to one consumed with fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and civilization itself.

Remarkably, there has never been a biography in English of the enigmatic Claude Levi-Strauss. Drawing on a...