Towards the end of his academic career, Lewis Coser wrote Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. The overall problem in the book is “the loss and generation of prestige”. Coser looks closely at a number of cases mostly in the social sciences and humanities, somewhat apart from these is also a chapter on writers. Given that the study is on scholars and that the most prominent refugee scholars figured within the natural sciences and architecture, Coser’s sample seems somewhat odd. Even more unusual is that, given Coser’s own status as refugee scholar, this is the only book-length study in which he addresses this particular issue. In this chapter I will try to look into the reasons why Coser came to this subject so late in his life as well as why his sample looked the way it did. My assumption is that the problem he tackles in his last major work was an issue that is reflected in all Coser’s works. There are hidden traces of this theme throughout his sociological career.