The pioneering work of Edwin Hardin Sutherland greatly expanded understanding of crime. Sometimes called the "Dean of Criminology," Sutherland wrote and taught between the 1920s and his death in 1950. A sociologist by training, he rejected early twentieth-century notions about criminals in his textbook Criminology (1924), for decades the standard textbook in the field. His enormous contributions included defining white-collar crime and elaborating his influential theory of differential association, which explains how people learn to become criminals. After an early association with the University of Chicago, he taught at Indiana University, where he co-founded its criminology department.

Born in 1883, in Gibbon, Nebraska, Sutherland was the son of a college professor. Earning his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago, he specialized in political economy until receiving an invitation to write a criminology textbook. The challenge of the book, a subject Sutherland had only occasionally taught, changed his life...