ABSTRACT
This chapter provides biographical background and context to David Matza's criminological career. Throughout the early course of his studies in social science, David planned to become a social worker. Much of David's early coursework centered upon radical social movements. When he graduated from City College of New York, he had decided to become a writer. His contributions to criminology continue to help frame current efforts to theoretically capture the causal processes of delinquent and criminal behavior. Delinquency and Drift and his follow-up book, Becoming Deviant, are criminological classics. Both books were able to capture and extend the major theoretical arguments on the causes of delinquency together with the existing empirical depictions of delinquency. In Delinquency and Drift, Matza portrayed the precepts of the subculture of delinquency as only marginally different from those of ordinary American life. In Becoming Deviant, Matza provided a sociological perspective on how individuals become deviant without reliance upon notions of determinism.
