Gary Alan Fine

Another area of research includes the complicated historical and social reputations of figures such as Thorstein Veblen, Benedict Arnold, Fatty Arbuckle, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Warren Harding, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Ford. On August 4, 2004, several months before the 2004 Presidential Election, he set off a minor storm, especially in the political blogger community, with his Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post "Ire to the Chief" that argued that the commonly expressed hatreds of Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Richard Nixon reflected their behavior and activities in youth more than their specific policies as President.

His work on rumor has made a substantial contribution to the understanding of urban legends and the transmission of rumors. In 2001, he co-authored a book with University of California-Davis Professor Patricia Turner on rumors in the African-American community and rumors and urban legends held by whites about blacks in the United States. He is currently researching rumors related to the September 11 attacks and terrorism. A recently published manuscript deals with the social production and communication of scientific work at the National Weather Service.

In addition to his analysis of restaurant establishment culture in his 1996 book Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work, Fine considers himself a sort of amateur restaurant critic. Through 2015, he maintained a blog, called Veal Cheeks, describing his restaurant visits while living in New York City. His writing style, punchy and wry, can also be seen in his review of Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, for Reason magazine.

In 1990, he became the department head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia, a position he held until 1993, after which he remained a professor. In 1990 he was also the President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism. During the term of 1994 to 1995, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, affiliated with Stanford University. He continued at the University of Georgia but accepted a position at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois beginning in 1997, where in 2005 he was named John Evans Professor. In 2002, he was the President of the Midwest Sociological Society, and in 2005 he was President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He remains at Northwestern and in 2003 was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden. In 2005 and 2006, he was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. He is the current editor (through 2010) of Social Psychology Quarterly, an official journal of the American Sociological Association. He is married to Susan Hirsig Fine and has two children.

In 1976, he became an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of Minnesota. At various times, he was a visiting professor at Indiana University (1980), the University of Chicago (1985), the University of Bremen (1986), and the University of Iceland (1988). In 1988, he received the American Folklore Society's Opie Award for the Best Scholarly Book in the field of Children's Folklore and Culture for his work With The Boys, an ethnographic study of Little League baseball teams.

The son of Bernard David Fine and Bernice Estelle Tanz, Fine grew up in Manhattan and went to the Horace Mann School. He studied psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa). He attended graduate school at Harvard University from 1972 to 1976 and received his PhD from Harvard in social psychology. His dissertation advisor was the eminent small group theorist Robert F. Bales.

Gary Alan Fine (born May 11, 1950, in New York City) is an American sociologist and author.