Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011) was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program. Biography Youth and education Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917, and grew up there in a Jewish family. His father, a furniture dealer, had hoped his son would follow him into the family business, but while he did work with his father, Garfinkel enrolled at the University of Newark to study accounting. At the University of Newark, courses were mainly taught by Columbia graduate students, whose theoretical approach guided Garfinkel later on. In the summer following graduation, Garfinkel volunteered at a Quaker work camp in Cornelia, Georgia, where he worked with students from diverse backgrounds who demonstrated a wide variety of interests, influencing his decision to later take up sociology as a career. While volunteering in Georgia, Garfinkel learned about the sociology program at the University of North Carolina. This program specifically focused on public work projects like the one Garfinkel was working on. Garfinkel completed his Masters in 1942 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after writing his thesis on interracial homicide under the supervision of Howard W. Odum. Garfinkel wrote the short story "Color Trouble", which was first published in the journal Opportunity in 1940, and discussed the victimization of segregated black women traveling on a bus in Virginia. His short story was based on the actual experience of civil rights attorney and activist Pauli Murray, and her housemate Adelene McBean, while traveling from Washington, D.C. to Murray’s childhood home in Durham, NC. With the onset of World War II, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and served as a trainer at a base in Florida. As the war effort wound down he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, where he met his wife and lifelong partner, Arlene Steinback. Harvard Department of Social Relations After the war, Garfinkel went to study at Harvard and met Talcott Parsons at the newly formed Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. While Parsons studied and emphasized abstract categories and generalizations, Garfinkel's work was more focused on