John Bordley Rawls is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of William Lee Rawls and Anna Abel (Stump) Rawls. Rawls received a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1943. During World War II, he served in the military, stationed in the Pacific. He attended Cornell University for a year from 1947-1948 and earned a doctorate from Princeton in 1950. In 1949, he married Margaret Warfield Fox, with whom he had four children.

Throughout his academic career, Rawls held posts in philosophy departments at several prestigious universities in England and the United States, including Princeton University, Oxford University, Cornell University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a professor of philosophy at Harvard University in 1962, where he remained through his semi-retirement as professor emeritus. As an academic, Rawls was active in several national...