Herbert Gans was born May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1940 and became a naturalized citizen in 1945. From 1945 to 1946, he served in the U.S.Army. In 1957, Gans received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He married Louise Gruner on March 19,1967.

Throughout his career, Gans has worked for the Chicago Housing Authority as an assistant planner, the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Studies as a professor of city planning and development, and he has been are search associate for the Center for Urban Education, New York City. Gans has as also been a professor of sociology at Columbia University and a professor of sociology and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Gans is known for his participant-observer sociological studies in which he immerses himself in the life of the community under consideration. Commentator John Goldthorpe finds that Gans's studies often...