Timothy Leary's Trip Thru Time

Timothy Leary (1920-1996) had an enormously varied career as a West Point cadet, clinical psychologist, psychedelic drug researcher, activist philosopher, popular culture icon, prolific author, sloganeer, gubernatorial candidate, prison convict and escapee, personal computer advocate, and iconoclastic figure on the American landscape. He used virtually every form of media available, from books to stage performances, from records albums to computer software, from academic lectures to bumper stickers, to get out his message of personal transformation based upon humanist principles and cutting edge science and technology.

Timothy Leary was without question one of the most controversial figures of his era, if not the 20th century. He was a polarizing figure in a time of generational conflict, a bold challenger of the status quo. (Perhaps his most enduring mantra is “Think For Yourself. Question Authority.”) The author of some 30 books and nearly 400 research papers, essays and articles, he interacted with many of the leading intellectuals of his era: Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler, Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk, Marshall McLuhan and Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

The timeline can be browsed as a slide show by using the right and left arrows on screen, or by jumping to a date on the navbar. The READ MORE link on each slide will take you to the full-length copy for that time period. A note on using the back button and bookmarking: When you use the back button it will always take you back to the first screen for that time period, and you will have to click READ MORE again to see the text.