An Intellectual Autobiography

Abstract

Although this essay is essentially an intellectual biography, personal experiences have influenced my career as an economist and historian of economic thought. For this reason, I shall devote some space to these experiences before turning to the main topic.My parents migrated from Sicily to the United States prior to the First World War; met and then married in this country and eventually settled in Hartford, Connecticut. I was conceived in 1929, the year of the Great Crash and born the following year at the onset of the Great Depression. However, for my family our economic depression had begun in 1929, when my father was seriously injured at a construction site and spent the next 8 months hospitalized, leaving my mother, who was pregnant with me, and my two siblings, without any means of support.