Alan Watts: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the Beat Generation and the emerging counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first best-selling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that psychotherapy could become the West's way of liberation if it discarded dualism. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be his best work. He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as The New Alchemy (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

After his death, his lectures remained popular with regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and found new audiences with the rise of the internet.