Lew Coser a few days after arriving at Stony Brook for graduate study in the fall of 1972. He was urbane, impeccably dressed, and the most erudite person I had ever encountered. I was a scruffy, long-haired surfer with a very low draft lottery number. I read Coser’s Masters of Sociological Thought as an undergrad and opted for graduate school over Vietnam. I took two courses from him in my first year, and wrote several papers on his beloved Simmel. We grew close, but he remained Dr. Coser. In May, as he prepared for his annual retreat to Cape Cod, he said I should contact him if I was in the area. Later that summer, my wife and I were in Cambridge, MA, and we called the Cosershis breadth of experience and engagement. Politics occupied a central place, as did his abiding interest in patterns of receptivity to ideas. When discussing his remarkable life, he did not like telling stories per se, but in the right context, he would reflect on his contacts with Andre Gide in Paris in the 1930s and involvement in antifascist movements then, or on the world of post-war political magazines, such as Politics, Partisan Review, and Dissent, and his close relationships with Dwight MacDonald and Irving Howe. One of Lew’s funniest stories involved his move to the University of Chicago to teach. He was staying at David Riesman’s home, which he was sharing with another young lecturer he had not yet met. Neither Rose nor Lew had ever been to