ABSTRACT
In the United States the sociology of literature is more or less limited to content analysis and the study of the effects of mass culture, with particular emphasis on commercial and political propaganda. With financial support from the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, the author began in 1926 with studies on German writers in the nineteenth century. The sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The model used in these studies is behavioristic, that is, unhistorical; sociology of literature in the sense of an analysis of art remains suspect. The chapter analyzes popular biographies as an illuminating criterion for significant transformations in political and social structure. Popular biographies in the United States operated in a different social context. The organization and "administration" of the imagination is taken over by agencies of social control, and reductionism, including that of the behavioral sciences, is a justifiable method, indeed the only appropriate method.