Friday 7:30am

slept a little later... read a comment to yesterday and it made me think of Ernest Becker... I had actually never read this bio, but just his book... one year I tried to read a lot of Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction... I liked his book... it really got me hooked on the word DENIAL... here is his bio...

Dr. Ernest Becker (September 1924, Massachusetts - March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer.
Becker was born into a Jewish family in Massachusetts. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the US Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960.
Becker came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion, even to what Sam Keen suggests is Becker's greatest achievement, the creation of the "science of evil." Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science specialization, Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that he gained wider recognition. The second half of his magnum opus, Escape from Evil (1975) developed the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book and is intended as the companion volume.