Noam Chomsky is regarded as one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century: not only did his generative grammar revolutionise the discipline, but his study of the way children learn languages remains one of the building blocks of the cognitive sciences. Beyond the field of linguistics, Chomsky is also known for his political commitment to the philosophy of anarchism.This intellectual biography, the result of a lengthy correspondence between the author and Chomsky, also draws on a series of interviews with contemporaries. It depicts Chomsky as an surprising combination of academic elitism and libertarian anarchism, and throws light on how Chomsky became implicated in the Faurisson affair. Robert Barsky teaches English Literature at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.