Author, Philosopher, and Sociologist. He is remembered as one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, he was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician of an Italian Roman Catholic descent. His father eventually became a Protestant. A prodigy student, he graduated in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main after three years in 1925 and obtained the qualification for university teaching in 1931. He was the co-founder the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1929 along with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. The facility was purely an academic enterprise, which included "Marxist workshops." During this time, he was able to enrich his philosophical and sociological vision through knowledge and cultural contact with men such as Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Inheriting his mother's musical talent, he also acquired considerable expertise in the field of musicology, inspired by the musical style of composers Arnold Schonberg and Alban Berg. He published several articles of music such as "The Social Situation of Music" in 1932, "On Jazz" in 1936, and "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" and "Fragments on Wagner" both in 1938. Adorno became an accomplished pianist and composer. After Adolph Hitler's National Socialist regime came to power in 1933 with persecution of the Jewish population, he changed his surname to "Adorno," escaping Germany in exile in 1934 for Oxford in England for four years, then New York City, and southern California. With the help of Horkheime, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfort was relocated in exile to Columbia University in New York City, but with financial difficulties, the facility became bankrupt and closed in 1941. After the United States entered World War II, he was labeled an "enemy alien" but became a naturalized citizen in November of 1943. While in California during the war, he and Horkheime wrote "Dialectic of Enlightenment," which was published in 1947 and is considered the core of critical theory. Critical theory aspires "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." In October of 1949 after the war, he returned to Frankfort, accepting a position in the School of Critical Theory in the philosophy department, establishing himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research, becoming director in 1953. In the 1960s, he became the political voice of Germany's New Left. During his career, he was well-published with at least 30 books and numerous essays. Besides his musical texts and "Dialectic of Enlightenment," he wrote "Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic in 1933," "Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life" in 1955, "Three Studies on Hegel" in 1963, and "The Jargon of Authenticity" in 1964. With Germans have difficulty fully understand his writings in their native language, translating his writings into English has been a challenge, but attempted several times. After a fourteen-year wait, he married Gretel Karplus in 1937.