HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERALD!

We especially remember Gerald Heard on this day, the 134th anniversary of his birth in 1889.

 In celebration of his birthday, I’ve lowered the price on the Kindle edition of our recently published title, Gerald’s magnum opus, The Five Ages of Humanity (formerly titled The Five Ages of Man), from $9.99 to $2.99, from today through this weekend.  If any of you are interested, please take advantage of this birthday special, bearing in mind that Five Ages is by no means a light read.

 For those who are newly signed up to our newsletter, I extend my warmest welcome and greetings.  I’ll reprint below our short biographical sketch from Five Ages, recounting Gerald’s remarkable life, career, and lasting influence.

Gerald Heard, October 6, 1889 – August 14, 1971

 Born in London on October 6, 1889, Henry FitzGerald “Gerald” Heard lived a life that would take many fascinating and fateful turns. Heard spent his university years at Cambridge University’s Gonville and Caius College. There, in 1911, he was conferred a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in history.

Following Cambridge, Heard worked for Lord Robson of Jesmond, then for Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the influential Irish agricultural cooperative movement. Heard published his first book Narcissus in 1924, which advanced the revolutionary idea that fashion and architecture provide clues to the evolutionary stages of humankind. In 1929, he produced his second book, The Ascent of Humanity, a brilliant, groundbreaking essay on the philosophy of history that was awarded the British Academy’s prestigious Hertz Prize.

Heard began his career as a public speaker in 1926, lecturing for three years under the auspices of Oxford University. In 1929, he became literary editor of The Realist, a short-lived but significant monthly journal of scientific humanism. There he worked with a distinguished editorial board that included Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. Pacifists Heard and Aldous Huxley, associated with the Peace Movement, gave lectures in England in support of their cause during the mid-1930s.

From 1930 to 1934, Heard served as the BBC’s first science commentator, commanding a large and regular listening audience with his sparkling fortnightly broadcasts. H. G. Wells said of him, “Heard is the only man I ever listen to on the wireless. He makes human life come alive.” The prolific Heard published ten books during the 1930s.

Gerald Heard moved to America, arriving in New York City in April 1937 on the S.S. Normandie, accompanied by Aldous Huxley. He traveled throughout the United States, taught for a term at Duke University, and embarked on a lecture tour with Huxley before settling in Southern California in early 1938. The next year he met Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Heard subsequently introduced the ecumenical Vedanta philosophy to Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and other Western notables, which prompted mystery writer Ellery Queen to write, “Gerald Heard is the spiritual godfather of this Western movement.”

In 1941, Heard put the larger part of his personal financial resources into building and endowing the pioneering Trabuco College, which advanced comparative-religious studies and interfaith practices. Under the spiritual direction of Heard, and 30 years ahead of its time, Trabuco College was discontinued in 1947 and later donated to the Vedanta Society of Southern California. In addition to writing essays, articles, and short stories, Heard published an astonishing eighteen books during the 1940s.

Alongside his nonfiction writing, Heard wrote several acclaimed mysteries and supernatural fantasies under the pen name H. F. Heard, including Reply Paid and Doppelgangers. He published two fiction anthologies, The Great Fog and The Lost Cavern. His best-selling 1941 novel A Taste for Honey, praised by Christopher Morley and Boris Karloff, and listed among the exclusive Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones, was loosely adapted into a movie, 1967’s The Deadly Bees, the first in the killer-bees genre. (Karloff played Mr. Mycroft in the ABC TV adaptation of A Taste for Honey, titled “The Sting of Death,” which aired in 1955.) His 1947 whodunit masterpiece, “The President of the United States, Detective” won first prize in the second-annual Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s prestigious short-story contest.

For the remaining fifteen years of his active life, Heard spent his time and energy in writing, lecturing, research, travel, and making numerous radio and television appearances. He moderated an eight-part series, Focus on Sanity, which appeared on CBS television in 1957. He lectured at many of the major colleges and universities in the United States, including Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, and UCLA. He spoke at religious venues as diverse as the Vedanta Society, the First Congregational Church in Akron, Temple Sinai in Beverly Hills, and the Soto Zen Temple in Honolulu. Heard was a behind-the-scenes inspiration and catalyst who spurred many individuals to pivotal accomplishments in their careers. His last book was his 1964 magnum opus The Five Ages of [Humanity], which Robert R. Kirsch, literary critic of the Los Angeles Times, praised as “…the most important work to date of this challenging and brilliant philosopher, a volume which in scope and daring might be the ‘Novum Organum’ of the 20th century.”

Gerald Heard, influential author, historian, lecturer, and philosopher, whom Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi referred to as “the repository of the most encompassing cosmology of his generation,” succumbed peacefully on August 14, 1971, at his home in Santa Monica, California at the age of eighty-one. For more information, visit www.geraldheard.com.

John Roger Barrie