What Color is Your Parachute? author

Richard N. Bolles, a former Harvard physics major, Episcopal priest and career counselor whose own twisting vocational path led to his writing What Color Is Your Parachute?,

the most popular job-hunter’s manual of the 1970s and beyond, died Friday in Danville, Calif. He was 90.

His son Gary confirmed the death. Bolles lived nearby in San Ramon, Calif.

Bolles originally self-published his manual in 1970 as a photocopied how-to booklet for unemployed Protestant ministers. In 1972, he recast it to appeal to a wider audience and found an independent publisher in Berkeley, Calif. Since then, Parachute has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and has never been out of print.

In 1995, the Library of Congress placed Bolles’ book squarely within the canon of classic American self-improvement literature by including it along with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in “25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives,” a list compiled as part of a

nationwide reading-incentive program.

Job-hunting was an art form, more like dating than like selling a used car, Bolles told readers. “You may never understand why things sometimes work, and sometimes don’t,” he wrote.

With that in mind, Bolles said, What Color Is Your Parachute? — subtitled A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career

Changers — was framed less as a guide to the job market than as a guide to help readers understand themselves and to help them figure out what they really liked doing so that they could find the job that would let them do it.

In a 2014 interview for this obituary, Bolles said he hoped his franchise would continue after he was gone. His son Gary, he said, had asked him about updating future editions of Parachute and finding other job-counseling experts who might provide fresh advice.

“I told him to make sure to find people who were funny, have a lightheartedness about them,” Bolles said. “When you are out of work and on the ropes, that is so important.”