Alan Watts was born in London in January of 1915 at the start of the first World War.

At a young age he became fascinated with the arts of the Far East, and by the
time he was ten or eleven he began to read thriller
stories by Sax Rohmer about about mysterious Oriental
villains. This interest led him in turn to the works of
Lafcadio Hern, Christmas Humphreys, and DT Suzuki, and
by fourteen was writing on Eastern themes, and was
published in the Journal of the London Buddhist Lodge
before producing his first booklet on Zen in 1932. He
moved to New York in 1938 and then to Chicago where
he served as an Episcopal priest for six years before
leaving the Church. In 1950 he moved to upstate New
York, and in late 1950 visited with Joseph Campbell and,
composer John Cage, and Luisa Commaraswamy at his
Millbrook farmhouse. Then in 1951 at the invitation of
Frederic Spiegelberg he moved to San Francisco to
teach at the Academy of Asian Studies.
Alan Watts was profoundly influenced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta
and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts
of China and Japan. After leaving the Church he never became a member of
another organized religion, although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoisim. Some American Buddhists criticized him for not
sitting regularly in zazen, even though he recorded several guided meditations
teaching a variety of mediation techniques. Alan Watts responded simply by
saying: A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks
away.
After teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco he became Dean,
and began to give regular radio talks on KPFA, the Berkeley free radio station. In
1957 he published his bestselling Way of Zen, and in 1958 returned to Europe where
he met with CG Jung. He was an early subject in pioneering psychedelic trials, and
after recording two seasons of the public television series Eastern Wisdom and
Modern Life traveled to Japan several times in the early sixties. By the late sixties he
had become a counter culture celebrity, and traveled widely to speak at
universities and growth centers across the US and Europe.
By the early seventies Alan Watts had become a foremost interpreter of Eastern
thought for the West, and was widely published in periodicals including Earth, Elle,
Playboy, and Redbook. He appeared on CBS televisions Camera Three in 1969,
and in 1971 he recorded a pilot for a new show titled A Conversation with Myself
for NET, the precursor to PBS. When the series was not produced he recorded the
shows in 1972 with his son Mark and his longtime audio archivist Henry Jacobs.
Overall Alan Watts developed an extensive audio library of nearly 400 talks and
wrote more than 25 books during his lifetime, including his final volume, Tao the
Watercourse Way. Alan died in his sleep in November of 1973 after returning from
an intensive international lecture tour. A film on his life and works is currently in
production.