1. Sears Roebuck had been built up by Julius Rosenwald, himself a German-Jewish immigrant in the nineteenth century, and the store was then still run mostly by Jews. Many years later we discovered that one of my mother's ancestors was a cousin of Rosenwald's.

2. The paper was written for an education course that some of my fellow sociology students and I took because it would make us eligible for high-school teaching later. I suspect that my interest in educational administration may have been included to impress the instructor, but I did not go back for the other required education courses. I suppose I would have liked to be a sociology professor even then, but such jobs were scarce, and I was not even in the department. I still do not understand my failure to make any practical occupational plans while in graduate school, but I do not recall any major anxiety about how I would earn a living after the M.A. However, the late 1940s were the start of the affluent society, even if it did not arrive for sociologists until much later.

3. Earl S. Johnson, The Humanistic Teachings of Earl S. Johnson , ed. John D. Hass (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983). In addition, I was enrolled in an introductory graduate survey course entitled ''The Scope and Methods of Social Sciences," which focused on "how the problem of a united, free, peaceful, prosperous world may be attacked by social science" ("Syllabus, The Scope and Methods of the Social Sciences," Division of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago, 1st ed. [October 1946], p. 11). My section of the course was led by Bert Hoselitz, but many other social scientists at the university lectured in the course.

4. I still remember virtually sneaking into the campus bookstore for my copy of Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure because the rivalry between the Columbia and Chicago sociology departments discouraged undue interest in Columbia authors.

5. During my undergraduate days I was on the staff of the college humor magazine and wrote a number of satirical pieces in which Plato and Aristotle were the villains. The only one I published reported the desertion of the university by its students after the chancellor banned bridge playing (of which I seem also to have disapproved) until researchers discovered that the game had been invented by a close friend of Aristotle; then the chancellor reversed his decision. "Hearts Were Trump When Aristotle Smiled," Pulse Magazine , April 1947, p. 17.

6. My interest in audience feedback mechanisms resulted in one of my first published papers, "The Creator-Audience Relationship in the Mass Media: An Analysis of Movie-Making," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America , ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 315-24.

7. I had to drop this topic because I did not read or speak Yiddish and thus could not content-analyze the plays, but I later made and published studies of acculturation in the work of two popular American-Jewish comedians, Mickey Katz and Allan Sherman. My interest in sociological research in the Jewish continue

community was stimulated by a brilliant course that Erich Rosenthal, who later taught for three decades at Queens College in New York, gave at the College of Jewish Studies in 1947, using mainly novels because of the lack of sociological studies. In those days sociology was close to heresy at the college, and Rosenthal was able to give the course only once.

8. Lynes later reprinted the article as chapter 13 of The Tastemakers (New York: Harper, 1955).

9. In fact I did so virtually at once, in a term paper comparing the concepts of culture and Kultur , which I wrote in the spring of 1949 for Kurt Riezler, a visiting professor from the New School for Social Research.

10. Moreover, that paper was published in a socialist magazine and consisted largely of a critique of Harold Rosenberg, the art critic who was one of its major contributors. "Popular Culture and Its High Culture Critics," Dissent 5(1958): 185-87.

11. I also had an invitation from Robert K. Merton to study for my Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University and a job offer from the Bureau of Applied Social Research, but it involved assisting Fred Ikle in a study of the evacuation of American cities in World War III. Partly because I had lived through the London blitz in 1940, it was not a subject I wanted to study.

12. I wrote a book-length monograph, which also dealt with the topics I had covered in my 1950 seminar paper, and later published an article, "Hollywood Films on British Screens: An Analysis of the Functions of Popular Culture Abroad," Social Problems 9 (1962): 324-28.

13. Herbert J. Gans, "The Social Structure of Popular Culture," unpublished paper, February 1959, p. 29. Later versions of the paper were "Pluralist Esthetics and Subcultural Programming: A Proposal for Cultural Democracy in the Mass Media," Studies in Public Communication , no. 3 (Summer 1961): 27-35; and "Popular Culture in America: Social Problem or Social Asset in a Pluralist Society," in Social Problems: A Modern Approach , ed. Howard S. Becker (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 549-620. A revised version, written for an abortive second edition of Howard Becker's text, is in Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication , ed. W. Phillips Davison, Rolf Meyersohn and Edward Shils (Teaneck, N.J.: Somerset House, 1972). An updated version of my book Popular Culture and High Culture , entitled "American Popular Culture and High Culture in a Changing Class Structure," appears in Art, Ideology and Politics , ed. Judith H. Balfe and Margaret Wyszomirski (New York: Praeger, 1985).

14. Gans, "Social Structure of Popular Culture," p. 29.

15. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture , p. 130.

16. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers , updated and expanded ed. (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 283-88.

17. Here my conclusions agreed with those of the editor of this anthology. See Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960).

18. This argument appears in my essay "The Audience for Television--and in Television Research," in Television and Social Behavior , ed. Stephen B. Withey and Ronald P. Abeles (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980), pp. 55-81. break

19. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, chap. 7 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

20. The book is Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1988). By the 1980s, populism had become a conservative term and for this reason and others, I went back to a concept I had learned from Martin Meyerson in the 1950s. It looks at people as users--of goods, services, ideas, policies, and the like, and I spent some pages of the book on the possibility of more user-oriented sociology.

21. One of those writers is Christopher Lasch, whose analysis I discuss in "Culture, Community, and Equality," democracy 2 (April 1982): 81-87.

22. Many of those immigrants were hostile to American popular culture, however, partly for class reasons but also because they felt that German popular culture had helped bring the Nazis to power and feared that the United States could become a fascist dictatorship.

23. That study also owed a considerable debt to W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New York: Yale University Press, 1945). It is reported most fully in my "The Origin and Growth of a Jewish Community in the Suburbs: A Study of the Jews of Park Forest," in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Ethnic Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), pp. 205-48.

24. My search for a rational religion ended more than thirty years ago, but occasionally the urge to do more empirical research in the Jewish community and to see whether the experts are still offering the same solutions has to be suppressed. For some observations of American Jewry not based on systematic research, see my "Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures," in On the Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman, ed. Herbert J. Gans, Nathan Glazer, Joseph R. Gusfield, and Christopher Jencks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 193-220.

25. In 1987, my wife was elected to a judgeship in New York's Civil Court. During the latter half of the 1950s, I was married to Iris Lezak, an artist who had taken a vow of poverty.

26. Some other sociologists at the University of Chicago to whom I am indebted are two then junior professors: Reinhard Bendix, the first of my sociology teachers when I was an undergraduate, and Morris Janowitz, for whom I conducted some initial research as he was beginning his community newspaper study. I also benefited from teaching assistants and researchers associated with the Department of Sociology--;and the names I now remember are Margaret Fallers, S. C. Gilfillan, Robert Johnson, and Harvey L. Smith--as well as from many professors in sociology and in other departments who are too numerous to mention. break