Nels Anderson

Nels Anderson (1889 to 1986) was an early American sociologist who studied hobos, urban culture and work culture. He studied at the University of Chicago under Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, and his first book, The Hobo (1923), used participant observation and was the first field research monograph of the Chicago School of Sociology. After a doctorate at New York University he taught at Columbia University from 1928 to 1934, then spent about thirty years as a public servant in labour and welfare agencies, publishing on hobos under the alias Dean Stiff. From 1953 to 1962 he headed the UNESCO Institute for Social Science at Cologne, and from 1965 to 1977 he was a professor at the University of New Brunswick.