To a generation in full revolt against any form of authority, Tune in, turn on, drop out became a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became first intrigued and then obsessed by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard, where he not only encouraged but instituted their experimental use among students and faculty. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Leary transformed himself from serious social scientist into counterculture shaman, embodying the idealism and the hedonism of an age of revolutionary change.
Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.
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PRAISE FOR TIMOTHY LEARY
Nearly every page is riveting in Timothy Leary, which unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Compulsively readable. THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
One
Late at night, a young boy lies in bed in his room. By all rights, he should be sleeping. Outside his window, the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, a small industrial city ninety miles west of Boston, are quiet. All the movie theaters have already let out for the night. The restaurants have long since locked their doors. Even the trolleys have stopped running. Because Prohibition has been the law of the land for more than a decade, there are no boisterous downtown nightclubs or loud neighborhood bars where people can drink legally. Yet as everywhere in a nation that professes one code of morals in public while practicing another in private, many of the good citizens of Springfield are out drinking all the same.
Unable to sleep, the boy waits. Will his fatherl£'