INTRODUCTION
On Marginality and Creativity
Robert Jackall

Art Vidich began to write this memoir in the late 1990s “as a set of recollections of a boy of immigrant Slovenian parents who tried to make his way in the brawling reality that is America that [he spent his] life trying to understand.” It became not only a remarkable record of an immigrant childhood and boyhood, but a self-portrait of a singularly important anthropologist/sociologist of the twentieth century.

This essay focuses on Vidich’s stance as an outsider, a habit of mind initially fostered by his family’s social situation and later embraced by him as essential for the kind of understanding he wished to achieve and impart to others. I begin in the middle of the story.

Small Town in Mass Society
Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman published Small Town in Mass Society in 1958. The book describes in close detail the social and cultural situation of “Springdale,” a rural, mid-century American small town in upstate New York, complete with telling portraits of Springdale’s class structure, its myths and ideologies, and of some key individuals charged or self-appointed with maintaining the town’s moral cosmos. The book moves freely between an analysis of Springdale’s social structure and the social psychology of its several groups. ...

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By Arthur J. Vidich
Edited and introduced by Robert Jackall
Newfound Press

CONTENTS
Introduction..........................................................................................1
1. Recollections of a Slovene Boyhood in America.........................17
2. Coming of Age in West Allis.........................................................81
3. Two Universities: Wisconsin and Michigan 1940-1943...........117
4. The Marine Corps, the Bomb, and Japan...................................147
5. The University of Wisconsin 1946-1948.....................................181
6. An Education at Harvard 1948-1950..........................................219
7. European Odyssey........................................................................275
8. Cornell and Springdale................................................................305
9. Exiled in Paradise: Puerto Rico...................................................341
10. First Years at The New School...................................................369
11. Excursus: Research in South America......................................409
12. The Re-Making of the Graduate Faculty..................................433
List of References ..........................................................................473

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