Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. 

Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. 

Watts was born to middle-class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent (now south-east London), on 6 January 1915, living at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. Watts's father, Laurence Wilson Watts, was a representative for the London office of the Michelin tire company. His mother, Emily Mary Watts (née Buchan), was a housewife whose father had been a missionary. 

With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings, and Watts, an only child, grew up playing at Brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family, the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. It mixed with Watts's own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.