Author. He was a 20th century American author, who wrote, during the pioneering years, on the subject of the scientific study of language and its structure. Originally, he studied to be an engineer, graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918. He accepted a position at Hartford Fire Insurance Company as a fire prevention engineer, staying with the company for many years. Two years after graduation, he married and the couple had two sons and a daughter. As a fundamentalist Christian with a literal interpretation of the Bible, he became interested in linguistics around 1928 after studying Hebrew from a religious viewpoint. This interest began as a hobby as he was never a linguist by profession. In 1928 he presented his first paper at the International Congress of Americanists, which was his translation of a Nahuatl document held at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. This paper was written on the Nahuatl language from the Uto-Aztecan language group, "Nahuatl Tones and Saltillo," yet was not published until 1997. During this time, he gained colleagues who were also studying various languages, including Edward Sapir, an anthropologist and linguist. Learning as much as he could from each of his colleagues as he was self-educating himself and gaining recognition in this field of study. He traveled to Mexico in 1930 and upon returning, Whorf enrolled in Sapir's first course at Yale University on "American Indian Linguistics". He had plans to earn a PhD but that never happened. Although there are many complexed theories on how a language is form, he was famous as a proponent of the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive the world. This principle has often been termed the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" after him and his mentor Edward Sapir. In the last ten years of his life, he dedicated his spare time to linguistic studies, doing extensive field work on Native American languages in the United States and Mexico as well as the Aztecs and Mayas of Mesoamerica. In 1936, he was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale. In 1937, Yale University awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938. His health began to decline about 1938. Many of his papers were collected and published posthumously after his untimely 1941 death from cancer. Whorf's publications include "The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan" in 1935, "Maya Writing and Its Decipherment" 1935, "Discussion of Hopi Linguistics" in 1937, "Science and Linguistics" and "Linguistics as an Exact Science" both in 1940, "Languages and Logic" in 1941, "Grammatical Categories" in 1945, "An American Indian Model of the Universe" and "A Review of General-Semantics" both in 1950 and "Language, Thoughts and Reality" in 1956 and reprinted in 2018. Born into a talented family, his younger brother, John Whorf, became an internationally renowned painter and illustrator. His youngest brother was Richard Whorf, who had a career in the Hollywood film industry as an actor, director, and producer.