SOURCE: "The Plea for Community," in The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, Mentor, 1964, pp. 160-70.

In the following excerpt from an article originally published in 1962, Morton and Lucia White describe Park's sociological vision of the city.

Park's career is the story of a sociologist who first saw society at close range as a newspaperman, then developed broad philosophical and sociological interests, and finally became an influential teacher of sociology at the University of Chicago. He traced his interest in sociology to his reading of Goethe's Faust, especially to Faust's fatigue with books and his desire to see the world. Starting his world-seeing as a reporter in Minneapolis, Park later moved on to New York, "the mecca of every ambitious newspaperman"; but like Dreiser he too became disenchanted with that city because, as Park put it, the newspaperman of those days usually lasted...