M. Scott Peck, 69, Wrote ‘Road Less Traveled’
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M. Scott Peck, who died Sunday at 69, was a record-selling self-help author who, to quote the opening sentence of “The Road Less Traveled,” insisted that “Life is difficult.”
Unlike today’s gurus, Peck didn’t promote easy solutions and surefire 10-minute personal-management regimens. Rather, the former Army psychiatrist, who once authored an official report on the massacre at Mai Lai, said that contradictions and difficulties had to be confronted with honesty and self-discipline. “Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand it and accept it – then life is no longer difficult” and spiritual growth can occur, he asserted.
All of this was famously at odds with the womanizing, chain-smoking heavy boozer who was a mid-life convert to Christianity and was pompous enough in the first flush of fame to consider a presidential run in 1983.
His books sold best in the Bible Belt. Time magazine, among other publications, speculated that “The Road Less Traveled” was most often bought as a gift “to give to irritating friends.” Peck himself suspected that two-thirds of the copies sold went unread. Despite writing a dozen books after “The Road Less Traveled” – including “People of the Lie,” “The Different Drum,” “Further Along the Road Less Traveled,” and most recently, “Glimpses of the Devil,” he never came close to re-creating the publishing phenomenon that was the “Road.”
But ride the success of “Road” he did, abandoning his suburban Connecticut psychiatric practice in the early 1980s. He was bored with his patients, who were “slow” and “do not listen.” He took to the road as an inspirational speaker at churches, conferences, and workshops, which themselves could be occasions of temptation to the man who regarded himself as “a prophet, not a saint.”
“I’m somebody who often, like so many people, preaches what he needs to learn,” Peck told Psychology Today magazine in 2002. Whatever could be said of his self-discipline, it would be hard to accuse him of anything but searing honesty about himself and his spiritual road.
Peck grew up in Manhattan, where his father was a successful attorney who eventually became a judge. Brought up in an emotionally arid, seemingly WASP household, he was shocked to learn, when he was in his early 20s, a family secret: His father was half Jewish. Excavating such buried truths was to become the passion of his life.
Peck prepped at the Phillips Exeter Academy, but to his parent’s consternation rebelled at conditions there. When he refused to return for his junior year of high school, his parents admitted him to a mental hospital, then relented and sent him to the Friends Seminary, the Quaker school on East 16th Street. There, Peck had his first exposure to Eastern religion, and by 18, considered himself a Zen Buddhist. “I was already a mystic,” he told Psychology Today.
For one who considered himself rebellious, Peck had a fairly conventional early career. He graduated from his father’s alma mater, Harvard. He then went to medical school, intent on becoming a general practitioner. While in medical school at Case Western Reserve University, he married Lily Ho, a Singaporean he had met while taking pre-med classes. Eventually, he would train her in psychiatric methods.
After graduation, he decided, surprisingly for one who had once been expelled from Middlebury College for refusing to participate in mandatory ROTC training, to become an Army psychiatrist. The Army, he later explained, would pay for him to specialize; otherwise he would have continued to rely on his father to pay for his education, a situation that brought out Freudian resentment.
He supervised drug rehabilitation clinics, was chief of psychiatry at the Army hospital in Okinawa, and served as assistant chief of psychiatry and neurology in the office of the United States Surgeon General in Washington, D.C.
While working in the Army, Peck became opposed to the Vietnam War and also fascinated by the connections between psychiatry and the government. “Dysfunction of the individual and dysfunction in political life are enormously analogous,” he told Omni magazine in 1988. He resigned from the Army in 1972 and moved to New Preston, Conn., where he set himself up in private practice.
Peck, who often described hearing voices of God and spirits, insisted that his books asked him to write them. After hearing the call (“this book said, ‘Write me!'”), he worked for 20 months on what he originally called “The Psychology of Spiritual Growth.” He eventually sold it for $7,500 to Simon & Schuster, which retitled it “The Road Less Traveled.” The initial press run was for 5,000 copies, and it nearly dropped from view before receiving a laudatory review in the Washington Post. Nevertheless, it took five years and a paperback edition before word of mouth established it as a bona fide best seller. After that, its momentum was unstoppable. Estimates of total sales run from 6 to 10 million copies. The book laid the ground for a new industry of self-help and spirituality literature that continues to buoy the publishing industry.
Peck said he first became interested in Christianity while in the Army, when he attended a staging of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. He later described becoming more interested in religion as he wrote “The Road Less Traveled,” but did not actually read the Gospels until later. “The Jesus I found was a person nobody would be able to make up,” he told Omni. He was baptized in 1980 and continued to have avid fans (as well as detractors) among the churches. In 1997, America magazine compared him favorably to C.S. Lewis and wrote that he was the “most widely read American spiritual writer of the last quarter of this 20th century.”
In addition to his many books and speaking engagements, Peck and his wife endowed the Foundation for Community Encouragement, which attempted to apply the methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous to other areas of society.
Stricken with Parkinson’s disease, impotent, divorced by his wife, and reportedly shunned by his children, Peck’s last few years were perhaps eased by a late marriage to a California teacher several years his junior.
He continued to write, and his last published book, “Glimpses of the Devil,” came out last January. It was an account of two exorcisms he had been involved with and included accounts of women transforming into snakes and demons.
Morgan Scott Peck
Born May 22, 1936, in New York City; died Sunday at his home in Connecticut of pancreatic and liver duct cancer; survived by his wife, Kathleen Kline Yates Peck; his daughter, Belinda; his son, Christopher, and two grandchildren.