Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies In San Francisco. In 1953 he began his groundbreaking public radio series, first as The Great Books of Asia and later Way Beyond the West, which began airing in Los Angeles in 1959. The radio series, along with his bestselling book, The Way of Zen, launched him into a career as a talented philosophical interpreter and a prolific public speaker, and in the 1960's he was adopted by the Counterculture movement as a spiritual figurehead. He and his peers, including Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and Gregory Bateson, helped establish the Esalen Institute, which become the epicenter for the Human Potential Movement in the late sixties and seventies. Watts travelled widely between 1965 and his passing in 1973, and his works include 25 books, 250 lectures and interviews, and over 100 workshops and television appearances. His legacy continues with the Alan Watts Org directed by his son, Mark Watts.