Searle was born in Denver in 1932. He spent some seven years in Oxford,
beginning as an undergraduate in the autumn of 1952 with a Rhodes Scholarship,
and concluding as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church. He has spent almost
all of his subsequent life as Professor of Philosophy in Berkeley. Searle’s Oxford
dissertation on the theory of descriptions and proper names contains an incipient
treatment of the topic of speech acts, but the latter grew in importance only after he
left Oxford, making itself felt in the article “What is a Speech Act?” (in Philosophy
in America, Max Black, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 221–
239) and in the book Speech Acts itself (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969), which was completed in 1964