Noam Chomsky

📍Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

“Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in December 1928, the elder son of William Chomsky, a distinguished scholar of Hebrew who had emigrated from Ukraine, and Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist. He grew up in the East Oak Lane neighbourhood in a household devoted to Hebrew culture, scholarship and politics, and he has said that the Depression-era Philadelphia of his childhood, and the anti-Semitism around it, shaped his early political awareness. As a boy he spent time at his uncle's newsstand in New York, absorbing radical political debate, and at ten he wrote an article on the spread of fascism for his school newspaper. He studied linguistics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, then joined the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and in 1955 moved to MIT, where he developed the theory of generative grammar and became one of the most influential intellectuals of his time.”

Sources: Barsky, R. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997), MIT Press; Chomsky, N. Language and Mind (1968), Harcourt; McGilvray, J. Chomsky: Language, Mind and Politics (1999), Polity Press