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again became a doctoral student. The economist James Laurence Laughlin was impressed by him, and in 1892, when Laughlin moved to the newly founded University of Chicago, he took Veblen with him. Veblen soon became editor of the Journal of Political Economy and began publishing in the field of economics. In 1899 his most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, appeared and achieved a notoriety all its own. But Veblen’s personal idiosyncrasies and his failure to properly “advertise” the university offended the administration at Chicago, and he was forced to move. His next job was at Stanford where, in a few short years, he encountered similar difficulties. He was compelled to move again, this time to the University of Missouri.
World War I found Veblen briefly in Washington as an employee of the U.S. Food Administration. After the war, he served for a short time as one of the editors of the Dial, a journal of literary and political opinion, and as a member of the faculty of the recently founded New School for Social Research in New York City. By then, even though his reputation as a scholar and publicist was at its peak, his academic career was at an end. Veblen retired and moved to California, near Stanford, where he died in August 1929, shortly before the onset of the Depression.
The economist Wesley C. Mitchell, who as student, colleague and friend of Veblen knew him as well and as long as anyone outside his family and possessed an intimate familiarity with his writings, commented in 1934 that “Thorstein Veblen is the most fascinating and the most enigmatic social thinker of our times. He explains others to themselves as the curious products of age-long processes of social change; but behind the glittering analysis that has shocked thousands