Scholars have long waited for an extended account of the life and career of the important Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman. It is truly said of Goffman that he was the most influential North American sociologist of the 20th century. Such a volume will make an invaluable contribution to the history of the social sciences.
Gary Alan Fine, James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
This book is ambitious, important, and a landmark work of biography.
Gary D. Jaworski, Professor of Sociology, Fairleigh Dickinson University
This is an important volume on one of the major 20th-century social theorists, Erving Goffman. There continues to be a strong undercurrent in sociology that goes back to the work of Erving Goffman, and although it is now more than 40 years since his premature demise, this undercurrent is as strong and powerful as at any other point in time. This book shows us why!
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Professor of Sociology, Aalborg University, co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies (2024) and editor of The Contemporary Goffman (2012)
A beautifully written, deeply informative, wise, and appreciative, yet critical, study of one of the 20th centurys most significant social thinkers. The study reflects the inimitable Shalins decades of research (including founding the invaluable Erving Goffman Archives) and is among the best social science biographies in English ever done. Necessary reading for understanding Goffmans central ideas and their antecedents and contexts!"
Gary T. Marx, author of Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology