The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, authored by Daniel Bell, is the work most associated with his name and gave wide circulation to the concept of the post-industrial society.

Bell was born on May 10, 1919, in the Lower East Side, and studied at the City College of New York, Columbia University, and St Antony's College. He worked across several roles during his career — as a journalist, opinion journalist, editor, and teacher — before becoming a professor at Harvard University. That range of professional experience, moving between editorial work and the classroom, shaped the breadth of his output. He had already published The End of Ideology in 1960, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism followed in 1976. His education and career across those decades provided the foundation from which those books emerged.

Bell received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship award, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Keiō University awarded him an honorary doctorate. A United States citizen, he died on January 25, 2011, in Cambridge. The W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship award stands as one concrete marker of the recognition his peers in sociology extended to him over the course of his working life.