Henry Gleitman

Henry Gleitman (1925 to 2015) was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Leipzig, Germany, he took his bachelor degree at the City College of New York and a doctorate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, then taught at Swarthmore College before joining the Penn faculty in 1953. He was a cognitive psychologist with interests in language, especially the relationship between semantics and syntax, though he described himself as a general psychologist whose research interests ranged over many of the traditional areas of psychological inquiry. He is best known as the author of Psychology, a classic introductory textbook first published in 1981 and now in its eighth edition. With his wife Lila Gleitman, a language acquisition researcher who was also a professor at Penn, he wrote the 1970 book Phrase and Paraphrase. Outside psychology he acted in and directed theatre, and he was ready to supervise students in any field of psychology that could interest him.