Introduction

Noam Chomsky, born Avram Noam Chomsky in 1928, is a writer and political philosopher and has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955. Of the numerous books he has written, several are considered to be seminal works in the field of linguistics; such titles as Syntactic Structures and Language and Mind were groundbreaking at the time of their publication and have since formed the basis for certain aspects of modern linguistic (and especially syntactic) theory. Chomsky is now best known, perhaps, as a political dissident; he has gained international notoriety for his criticism of United States foreign policy. Several recent sources note that Chomsky is the most cited living person in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

A note on the scope of this document

This pathfinder has been designed to guide graduate and undergraduate students toward the most important and most frequently cited works by and about Noam Chomsky. These works will be useful to students doing preliminary research on Chomsky or in fields with which Chomsky is affiliated, as well as those curious about aspects of Chomsky's professional and personal life. All materials cited herein are available at the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or via the World Wide Web.

Image courtesy of Bad News: Noam Chomsky Archive