The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life

Erving Goffman was born in Canada in 1922. He received his BA from the University of Toronto in 1945, then studied at the University of Chicago, receiving his MA in 1949 and his PhD in 1953. For a year he resided on one of the smaller of the Shetland Isles while gathering material for a dissertation on that community, and later he served as a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, DC. Goffman authored several articles and book reviews that appeared in publications such as Psychiatry and The American Journal of Sociology. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was first published as a monograph in 1956 by the University of Edinburgh’s Social Sciences Research Centre. Goffman was influenced by the work of thinkers and academics such as Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schütz, and Georg Simmel, among others. His seminal works on human social behavior, such as the text summarized above, established him as one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. He spent the final years of his life (1969-1982) at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania, where he held the title of the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology.