Seymour Bernard Sarason was born to Jewish immigrant parents on January 12, 1919, in Brooklyn, New York. He died on January 28, 2010, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of 91. He obtained his undergraduate degree in 1939 from Dana College in Newark (now Rutgers University), and earned his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1942 from Clark University, at the age of 23. Seymour' first job was Chief Psychologist at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut (1942 to 1945); at the time, Southbury was a new and innovative institution for the mentally retarded. Seymour accepted a faculty position in 1945 in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He spent the next 45 years at Yale--his entire professional career. He wrote prolifically (45 books; 66 articles); many of his writings are viewed as classics. As a social observer, critic, and visionary, Seymour was a founding father of community psychology--a new field that was preventive in orientation, that focused on qualities of social settings (regularities) and their culture as the target for treatment (not individuals), that sought to reduce the gap between potential and performance (indeed saw potential everywhere), and that was concerned with powerful social change cognizant of history and institutional culture. In education, Seymour reframed learning as occurring within a social situation--a deeply radical understanding at the time. He argued that how schools conceptualized "ability" and "productive learning" was at the heart of its failure to provide opportunity to learn, for both students and teachers alike. He understood early on that for productive learning to occur for students, it had to occur for teachers. He captured the qualities of the school culture that killed the creativity of teachers and principals. He was skeptical about educational reforms that failed to change the culture of classrooms. Far beyond the enormity of his intellectual contributions, Seymour was among the most beloved of psychologists.