The next few weeks I will be reviewing two books by M. Scott Peck, MD. The long article below summarizes Dr. Peck’s life. Those who don’t like to read can skip this entry.
He was a gin-sodden, marihuana-inhaling, parent-resenting, chain-smoking adulterer who, by his own admission, failed to live a life his words advocated. September 25, 2005, impotent and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he died of liver and pancreatic cancer at age 69. Tiring of his infidelities, his first wife left him in 2003. His two oldest children had, for years, refused to talk with him. Psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck MD, author of The Road Less Traveled and 14 other books that made him a millionaire, an admired speaker and an advocate of self-discipline, restraint and responsibility lacked, he sadly acknowledged, the character traits he held most dear.
Morgan Scott Peck’s father, a self-made Park Avenue lawyer and judge who hid his Jewish heritage, raised his son to be the ultimate WASP, placing him on an education road that passed through Phillips Exeter Academy bound for Harvard University. Instead, Scotty, as his friends knew him, took a detour. Hating the competitive environment of Exeter, Scotty, a tiresomely brilliant adolescent, dropped out of school. His parents placed him in a psychiatric hospital.
”When I left Exeter I felt very badly about myself,” he said. ”I thought there was something wrong with me, and my parents thought I must be crazy. Why was I out of step with this golden road that had been laid out for me?” After a few weeks in the hospital, an experience he viewed as a turning point, he never again worried about being on an aberrant road.
He next attended Friends Seminary, a small Quaker school in Greenwich Village, where, at age 17, he became “hooked on Buddhism,” a religion he later described as ”a training school par excellence in paradox. Without that training, I don’t think I’d be able to swallow the God-awful paradoxes in Christianity.”
Expelled from Middlebury College for refusing to attend ROTC classes, his road, briefly, turned golden. Scotty, with help from his father’s connections, entered Harvard. After graduating from Harvard in 1958 with a degree in social relations, he married Lily Ho, a Chinese student from Singapore. His father disinherited him.
Receiving his pre-med hours at Columbia University, he graduated from Case Western Reserve University Medical School in 1963. Scotty, a military-abhorring, war-protesting, half-hippy joined the Army because, “it was the cheapest way to continue studying medicine.” Paradoxically, a dissenter of the Vietnam War rose to become Assistant Chief of Psychiatry at the Surgeon General’s office in Washington DC. In 1972, Lieutenant Colonel Peck, resigned to enter private practice in Connecticut.
With the popularity of The Road Less Traveled and his next book, People of the Lie that explored human evil, Dr. Peck tired of his own patients, whom he thought “slow” and insufficiently attentive. In 1984, he began lecturing and writing full-time. Peck, meanwhile, traveled along a religious road that ranged from Zen Buddhism to Jewish and Muslim mysticism to Christianity. In People of the Lie, he wrote, “After many years of vague identification with Buddhistand Islamicmysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christiancommitment — signified by my nondenominational baptism.” He was baptized by a Methodist minister in an Episcopal convent.
Despite his conversion, Peck described himself as “a flawed man who had a weakness for cheap gin, marijuana and women.” Peck, admired for openly confessing his transgressions, leaves us puzzled over the incongruence of sincere words written by a man who struggled to follow the path he so clearly described. (Lest we become too critical, let us remember that all of us sin and “fall short of the glory of God.” Words written emerge easier than words willed. Sermons preached flow easier than sermons practiced.)
In 1976, Dr. Peck became inspired to write a book. Twenty months later, Random House rejected the book originally entitled The Psychology of Spiritual Growth, judging the final section “too Christ-y.” Jonathan Dolger, an acquisitions editor for Simon & Schuster, purchased the book with an advance of $7,500 and published it as The Road Less Traveled. The book entered the marketplace unnoticed. Simon & Schuster sent one of the initially printed 5,000 copies to Phyllis Theroux at The Washington Post. Ms. Theroux said that she spent two weeks writing a review “that would force people to buy the book.” Dr. Peck stimulated sales by copying the review and sending it to several hundred newspapers around the country.
By 1980, a reprint produced hardcover sales of 12,000 copies. The paperback edition sold 30,000 in its first year. Soon, The Road Less Traveled, popular with Alcoholics Anonymous, became a word-of-mouth sensation. The number of sold paperbacks doubled in each of the next two years, and in 1983, five years after publication, The Road Less Traveledreached the New York Times best-seller list where it remained for more than 13 years. Translated into more than 20 languages, sales reached 10 million copies worldwide.