Benjamin Lee Whorf died on July 26, 1941, at his home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, after an illness of several months; he was 44 years old. Whorf was trained as an engineer, having graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918; at the time of his death he was an assistant secretary of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His work in linguistics began about 1928, with an interest in the decipherment of Maya; this led to his studying modern Mayan and Aztec, and thence to a deep penetration of the field of American Indian and general linguistics. In 1930 Whorf held a Social Science Research Council grant, under which he recorded the Aztec dialect of Milpa Alta, Mexico. In 1936 and 1937 he was a research fellow at Yale, and the association with Edward Sapir during those years was, in his own opinion, the most important influence on his linguistic thinking.