It is traditional in volumes such as this – especially volumes appearing relatively soon after the death of their subject – to include a lengthy, and often rather dry and boring, intellectual biography. In the case of Putnam, such an essay would not, in fact, be boring (although, given the richness of Putnam's life, such an essay might have to be rather lengthy!) But we wanted to do something a little different, and at any rate we knew we couldn't do a better job at biography than what is already in the gripping intellectual autobiography Putnam wrote for his installment in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Auxier et al. 2015).