How to Become Intimate with a Book You Did Not Write Backstage Collaboration in Creating Sociological Understanding

While there is ample recognition that intellectual work is - to some degree - relational and cooperative, most narratives of production focus on how intellectual supporters aid the author and the crafting of a work. In this contribution, I adopt a perspective centered on intellectual work as “dialogue and draft” among triads - the author, the work in progress, and the supporter - with a particular attention to the relationship that intellectual supporters develop with the work and the author. Through an archival analysis of personal correspondence that covers the years 2005–2021, drafts, and interventions, I tell a story of A Joyfully Serious Man as an ongoing project that shifted shape at critical junctures and in which not only the object and the author, but also the supporter were transformed. In the concluding remarks, I offer some potential questions for advancing the historical and sociological study of how intellectual self-concepts change in the context of asymmetric, yet very intimate, relations with work carried out by others.