Constellation Similarity Assertions

David Riesman (born September 22, 1909, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.-died May 10, 2002, Binghamton, New York) was an American sociologist, attorney, writer, and educator. He is best known as the author of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, 1950), an examination of post-WWII American society. The book struck a chord with readers and became a bestseller, contributing the terms "inner-directed," "outer-directed," and "tradition-directed" to discourse on the social character of modern Americans in an age of burgeoning prosperity and consumerism.

Riesman was educated at Harvard University, receiving an A.B. in biochemistry in 1931 and a law degree in 1934. Following law school, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis for a year, then taught law at the University of Buffalo from 1937 to 1941 (now the State University of New York at Buffalo). He also served as a deputy assistant district attorney in Manhattan in 1940, where he contributed to the state legislature's anti-Communist Rapp-Coudert committee hearings. Riesman spent World War II working as an executive at the Sperry Gyroscope Company.

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