The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment

Summary

The life of Timothy Leary is examined through papers and correspondence preserved in his archive.

The first collection of Timothy Leary's (1920–1996) selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness. Through Leary's papers, the listener meets such key figures as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan. Author Jennifer Ulrich organizes this rich material into an annotated narrative of Leary's adventurous life, an epic quest that had a lasting impact on American culture.

"A fascinatingly intimate record of how this brilliant, courageous, and awed genius changed our world." —Michael Backes, author of the bestselling Cannabis Pharmacy