"Early in his career, he was a co-author of two seminal works on American society, 'The Lonely Crowd'... in 1950 and 'Beyond the Melting Pot'... in 1963."

"Later volumes included 'We Are All Multiculturalists Now' in 1997 and 'From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City' in 2007.... A child of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Nathan Glazer was born on Feb. 25, 1923, in New York City and spent his early years in East Harlem. His father, Louis, was a garment worker, and his mother, Tilly, was a homemaker. Nathan was the youngest of seven children, and when he was 10, the family, which was crammed into a four-room apartment, moved to the wider spaces of the East Bronx. Mr. Glazer’s interest in urban affairs stemmed directly from personal experience, and his upbringing had an impact on his later ideas. His East Harlem tenement block, dominated by the iron structures of elevated trains, had no trees or green strips. It was, Mr. Glazer once said, a 'bad place to live.' Only a few blocks away was Central Park, where a boy could lose himself in the meadows and woodlands, enjoying a respite from the city’s noise and grime. For Mr. Glazer, the park was a 'wonder' of childhood, and in years to come, when some urban planners challenged Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of a pastoral retreat within a crowded city, he spoke out in Olmsted’s defense.... Mr. Glazer’s turn to neoconservatism followed an almost paradigmatic path. Throughout the 1950s, and even after he went to work for the Kennedy administration’s Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1962-63, he continued to consider himself a radical. But if, as his longtime friend Irving Kristol put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then Mr. Glazer got hit over the head...."

From "Nathan Glazer, Urban Sociologist and Outspoken Intellectual, Dies at 95" (NYT).