Walter Truett Anderson

I spent the first years of my life happily running around on a ranch in northeastern Nevada, about forty miles of dirt road from a town that wasn't much when you got there.

I wrote for the daily newspaper and the humor magazine when I was a student at Berkeley, and also had a part-time job editing a weekly newspaper in a small town nearby.

My first book, The Age of Protest, was published in 1969. At that time I was recently married and doing a lot of different things -- freelance writing, graduate studies at USC, teaching American Government at Cal State Northridge and psychology at Pepperdine, and conducting programs at Esalen and other centers of the then-blossoming human potential movement. I also became a father in 1969; my son Daniel is now bigger than I am, has two daughters, and teaches at MIT.

My main professional activity is writing nonfiction books; this is the kind of work I find most satisfying, and also, of course, the kind that takes most of my time. I have published 17 books on a range of subjects including political and cultural change, psychology, human evolution, Buddhism, biotechnology, and world politics. Four of these were anthologies, one of them a collaboration. Many have been republished in foreign-language editions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

My best-known book, Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, has been in print for over 20 years and was honored as "one of the 100 most important books about the future."

I serve on the editorial boards of several journals, for which I write occasional articles and reviews, and have contributed to magazines such as Mother Jones, Reason, Psychotherapy Networker, and Time. I was for several years a contributing editor of the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, writing op-ed pieces and feature articles; and also was an editorial consultant to the environmental organization California Tomorrow and an editor of its quarterly Cry California .

I have been associated with Saybrook University in San Francisco as one of the original members of the advisory board of the Rollo May Center for Humanistic Studies, as a member and chair of the board of trustees, and currently as a member of the distinguished consulting faculty. I have also taught at other insitutitons including the California School of Professional Psychology and the School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.