Alan Watts was a former Episcopal priest, born in London in 1915. He came to the U.S. in the 1930s, where he would become a scholar of Eastern religions. He moved to San Francisco in 1951 where he began teaching Buddhist studies, and in 1956 began his popular radio show, Way Beyond the West. By the early 1960s, Alan's radio talks aired nationally and the counterculture movement adopted him as a spiritual spokesperson. He went on to write more than twenty other books. He died in 1973.