Combining careful organization with a highly readable style, eminent scholar Avrum Stroll outlines the unconventional backdrop to Wittgenstein's great philosophical achievements: his dramatic change of professions, his eccentric lifestyle, and his privileged background. Lively and hopeful analogies punctuate this crisp and straightforward analysis of the philosopher's three great ideas, revealing the dramatic reversals of opinion that characterized Wittgenstein's career, and provide a penetrating insight into the way in which language shapes our world.