[28] His mother, Fannie (Segal), the daughter of immigrants from Romania,[29] was a locally renowned pianist for radio, vaudeville, and silent films.

[32] As an adolescent, Cavell played lead alto saxophone as the youngest member of a black jazz band in Sacramento.

[29] He entered the University of California, Berkeley, where, along with his lifelong friend Bob Thompson, he majored in music, studying with, among others, Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch.

[39] In 1962–63 Cavell was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he befriended the British philosopher Bernard Williams.

[49] Cavell wrote extensively on Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Martin Heidegger, as well as the American transcendentalists Henry Thoreau[50] and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[53] Cavell's work incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement between and within these thinkers' ideas influenced his views in the arts and humanities, beyond the technical study of philosophy.

Cavell is well-known for The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his work and has its origins in his doctoral dissertation.

In Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Cavell describes his experience of seven prominent Hollywood comedies: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth.

Cavell argues that these films, from 1934–1949, form part of what he calls the genre of "The Comedy of Remarriage," and finds in them great philosophical, moral, and political significance.

"[55] According to Cavell, the emphasis these movies place on remarriage draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship, happiness requires "growing up" together with one's partner.

Having used Emerson to outline the concept, the book suggests ways we might want to understand philosophy, literature, and film as preoccupied with features of perfectionism.

"[57] The book also contains extended discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Fred Astaire, as well as familiar Cavellian subjects such as Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger.