BENJAMIN LEE WHORF BIOGRAPHY

Born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts, Benjamin Lee Whorf was the oldest of three sons of Harry, a commercial artist who experimented with playwriting and stage design, and Sarah Lee Whorf. Whorf graduated from Winthrop High School in 1914 and went on to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1918.
 

After graduation, Whorf joined the Hartford Fire Insurance as a trainee in fire prevention engineering. He remained with the Hartford for the rest of his short life, developing a national reputation as an expert in industrial fire prevention and authoring several articles on the subject. On Nov. 6, 1920, Whorf married Celia Peckham and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford, becoming the parents of three children.

Edward Sapir

A childhood love for ciphers and puzzles, and wide sparetime reading and directed self-study in a number of fields, led to the development of a profound avocational interest in linguistics, pursued in off hours and on business trips. Under the influence of the French mystic Fabre d'Oliver, himself an amateur linguist, and his own strong religious background (he was a Methodist), his study (including actual field work) of American Indian languages like Aztec, Mayan, and Hopi led to his development of a theory of "linguistic relativity"--an approach to comparative linguistics which he shared with Yale anthropologist Edward Sapir.

In the late 1920s he began a prolific correspondence with noted scholars in anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. In 1931, he even enrolled as a graduate student at Yale in order to study under Sapir. And he begaan to publish his ideas on linguistics not only in major scholarly journals (Language, American Anthropologist) but in more popular forums like M.I.T.'s Technology Review. His three essays in the latter journal--"Science and Linguistics" (1940), "Linguistics as an Exact Science" (1940), and "Languages and Logic" (1941)--helped to disseminate his ideas widely. During 1940 and 1941, his essays and reviews on a wide variety of topics appeared regularly in the pages of the journal Main Current in Modern Thoughts. He died of cancer on July 26, 1941.

Under the editorship of John B. Carroll, many of Whorf's most important essays were collected in Language, Thought, and Reality, published in 1956 by the M.I.T. Press. He left behind a number of manuscripts--on gravitation, "being," trees, color theory, evolution, the trinity, a Hopi dictionary--still unpublished.

Whorf often said that his dual career actually aided rather than hindered his scholarly career. Nevertheless, the amazement felt by his editor John B. Carroll in considering his achievements would seem more truthful:
 

It was truly remarkable that he was able to achieve distinction in two entirely separate kinds of work. During periods of his life, his scholarly output was enough to equal that of many a full-time research professor; yet he must have been at the same time spending some eight hours every working day in his business pursuits. His friends often speculated on why he chose to remain in his occupation. Although several offers of academic or scholarly research positions were made to him during the latter years of his life, he consistently refused them, saying that his business situation afforded him a more comfortable living and a freer opportunity to develop his intellectual interests in his own way.