He was born in 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, and still retains some of that West Virginia accent. He was a brilliant student in school, especially in mathematics. He taught at MIT for a while and then Princeton (still does). But in the 50s, he developed a serious mental illness. He literally had gone mad. For example, he believed for a time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times. Eventually getting treatment, he began teaching and working again. In fact, in 1994 he won the Noble Prize for Economics.
