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Early Life
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ze'ev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were immigrants of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Noam was the Chomskys' first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, in 1934. Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia's Central High School -
University Years
In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages. Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. -
Early Career
Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). https://youtu.be/E3U6MsdBalg -
Early Activism
While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert's South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company. In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights. Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally. https://youtu.be/A1RrbexZ5LY -
Iraq War Criticism and Retirement from MIT
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Chomsky was widely interviewed; Seven Stories Press collated and published these interviews that October. Chomsky argued that the ensuing War on Terror was not a new development but a continuation of U.S. foreign policy and concomitant rhetoric. Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002, but continued to conduct research and seminars. Chomsky supported the Occupy movement, delivering talks at encampments and producing two works that chronicled its influence. -
Personal Life
Chomsky endeavors to keep his family life, linguistic scholarship, and political activism strictly separate from one another, calling himself "scrupulous at keeping my politics out of the classroom". An intensely private person, he is uninterested in appearances and the fame his work has brought him. Chomsky acknowledges that his income affords him a privileged life compared to the majority of the world's population. https://youtu.be/OHAndY1GsVc
