Patience pays off. Just ask Gabriel Almond, whose doctoral thesis has finally been published -- 60 years after he wrote it.
As a pugnacious University of Chicago grad student in 1938, Almond refused to delete an unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller from his study of New York City politics. Rockefeller was a huge contributor to the university; without the change, Almond’s faculty adviser declined to recommend the work for publication.
“I was briefly angry,” says Almond, 87, a retired Stanford political science professor who lives in Palo Alto. “Then I went off to war. When I came back, there were other books to write.”
He went on, in fact, to publish more than a dozen books. Meanwhile, his thesis became an underground favorite among students who discovered it in the university’s library. When Chicago professor Terry Nichols Clark was putting together a series of books on urban policy for Westview Press, he decided to include the cult classic.
Almond now says he was “too big for my britches” as a young academic. If he could make the decision again, he would delete the Rockefeller section from the thesis to get his adviser’s approval. “I would just publish that part somewhere else,” he says.
