Harvey Sacks

In 1975 Sacks died in a car accident. He was survived by his wife, two siblings, and his parents.

Sacks received his doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1966), an LL.B. at Yale Law School (1959), and a B.A. at Columbia College (1955). He lectured at the University of California, Los Angeles and Irvine from 1964-1975.

Sacks's major work, Lectures on Conversation, is composed of edited revisions of transcribed lectures held from Spring 1964 through to 1972, and comprises about 1200 pages in a two-volume work published by Basil Blackwel in 1992. This publication project was instigated largely by David Sudnow and Gail Jefferson, colleagues and students of Sacks at Berkeley, UCLA and Irvine, and includes an introduction by Emanuel Schegloff. In her acknowledgements in these volumes, Jefferson mentioned the help of Sudnow in dealing with Sacks's literary estate. The Harvey Sacks Memorial Association, registered as a not-for-profit Association, was formed by Sudnow.

Sacks became interested in the structure of conversation while working at a suicide counseling hotline in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The calls to the hotline were recorded, and Sacks was able to gain access to the tapes and study them. In the 1960s, prominent linguists like Noam Chomsky believed that conversation was too disorganized to be worthy of any kind of in-depth structural analysis. Sacks strongly disagreed, since he saw structure in every conversation, and developed conversation analysis as a result.

Harvey Sacks (July 19, 1935 – November 14, 1975) was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.