Because Adorno's American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The Stars Down to Earth), the essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television"; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute.

Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed the essays "Notes on Kafka", "Valéry Proust Museum" and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were included in the 1955 essay collection Prisms. In response to the publication ofThomas Mann's The Black Swan, Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature, appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame," which, along with studies of Proust, Valéry and Balzac, formed the central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to Literature. Adorno's entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers' Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress."^[37]

Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including a collection of essays entitled Sociologica (1955), the Gruppenexperiment (1955), a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann called Betriebsklima and theSoziologische Exkurse, a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline.