the Midwest, and the unfamiliar setting of the first evening was rendered more unusual by the sounds of gunfire. Racing down the stairs, Lew met his new housemate, C. Wright Mills. ‘Charley’ was shooting at empty beer bottles in the Riesman’s fireplace.

Lew wrote, with great facility, thousands of book and journal reviews. The most remarkable thing was that he often wrote the review upon receipt of the book or manuscript. When staying with them at their summer cottage, I would make the morning mail/newspaper run. I remember giving Lew a new book or manuscript, whereupon he would disappear for a few hours, and pound out a review on his old manual typewriter. I envied his first drafts, written with such panache and verve. His writing was infused withWhen the magazine did appear (from 1942-45), Lew (writing as Louis Clair) wrote some pieces for it. They were mostly in defense of more traditional socialist ideas; he objected to the revisionist notions some of us were expressing. He was more committed to the socialist vision than I was, and this led later to his collaboration with Irving Howe as a co-editor of Dissent.

Although Lew and I had some basic disagreements, we remained good friends as both of us concentrated on the work we were doing in sociology. Some echoes of the past remained, however. In the early 1960s, Lew was a visiting professor at Berkeley, and he helped organize a “Dissent Forum” on the topic, “Should Students Be Radicals?” I said students should be students and should