Author wrote The Road Less Travelled
M. Scott Peck, who has died aged 69, was a psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Travelled, the ultimate self-help manual, which has sold some 10 million copies and which set a record for a nonfiction book by spending more than eight years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Its opening sentence, “Life is difficult,” introduced a tome that argued uncontentiously and sensibly that human experience was trying and imperfectible, and that only self-discipline, delaying gratification, acceptance that one’s actions have consequences, and a determined attempt at spiritual growth could make sense of it. By contrast, Peck himself was, by his own admission, a self-deluding, gin-sodden, chainsmoking neurotic whose life was characterized by incessant infidelity and an inability to relate to his parents or children. “I’m a prophet, not a saint,” he explained in an interview earlier this year.
In 1983 he began a bid for the presidency of the United States in order to be “a healer to the nation,” but was forced by health fears to abandon his ambitions. Recently, he had written in Glimpses of the Devil
(2005) about his experiences of conducting exorcisms and had embarked on a new career as a songwriter.
“I went into a sort of guided meditation and I imagined there were a million people around the globe, Japan, Ethiopia, Brazil, America, what not, all with headphones on listening to this thing and that their consensus would somehow be objective ... I played it for the 62nd time and I said: ‘ Holy s---! It’s not good. It’s great’.”
Morgan Scott Peck was born on May 22, 1936, in New York City. Though in a secular household, Scott attended a Quaker day school and became fascinated by religion, becoming a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18. By his own account, he was a tiresomely brilliant child. Like all the others, his ambition was to write the Great American Novel.
Despite his literary ambitions, he enrolled in a pre-med course at Columbia University, taking night classes and working at Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric division during the day. At that time, he took a dim view of psychiatry, and enrolled at CaseWestern Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio, aiming to become a general practitioner.
At Columbia, he had met Lily Ho, from Singapore; they were married during his first year of medical school. Both sets of parents disapproved, and Peck’s father went so far as to disown him, though he later relented and paid his school tuition fees.
After graduation in 1963, Peck joined the U.S. Army as a psychiatrist, this being the only way in which he could train while receiving a wage sufficient to support his wife and children.
In 1976, he received an urgent inspiration to write a book that, 20 months later, he submitted to Random House with the title The Psychology of Spiritual Growth. His editor liked the first two sections, but thought the third “too Christ-y.” Simon & Schuster picked it up for US$7,500 and published it as The Road Less Travelled. In 1983, it entered the bestseller lists and stayed there for eight years. It was most popular with members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Peck, meanwhile, found himself drawn from Eastern mysticism to mainstream Christianity, though he remained unfaithful to his wife, maintained his drink and cigarette intake, and was liberal on issues such as euthanasia. “Religion and psychology are not separate,” he told Playboy.
He wound down his practice and set out on the lecture circuit, charging US$ 15,000 a talk. Latterly he suffered from impotence and Parkinson’s Disease and devoted himself to Christian songwriting, at which he was not very good.
He married Lily Ho in 1959; they had three children, two of whom would not speak to their father. She left him in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Kathy, who he picked up, while still married, after a lecture at Sacramento, and by his children.