Bruner, Jerome S

Jerome Bruner was born October 1, 1915 in New York City into a nominally Jewish family and his parents hailed from Poland. After his businessman father died when Jerome was 12, he moved each year with his mother and siblings, sisters Min and Alice, and half-brother Adolf. He received his B.A. from Duke University in 1937 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941, where his professors included Gordon Allport, Edwin Boring, Henry Murray, and Smitty Stevens. He served in the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps from 1941 to 1944, during which time he was involved with the wartime propaganda effort. His activities during the war included work in the United States on public opinion and work in France on “cultural relations” including psychological warfare and political intelligence. In France, the 26-year-old's duties included meetings with such literati as Paul Eluard, Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gertrude Stein. In the United States, he became a close friend of Robert Oppenheimer, who some years later invited Bruner to spend a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Keywords: child development; cognitive development; cultural psychology; language development