WATTS, Alan Wilson. The Legacy of Asia and Western Man. A Study of the Middle Way. London, John Murray, [1937].
8vo. Original cloth, lettered in gilt; pp. xviii, 187, [3, publisher's catalogue]; light marking to cloth, ownership inscription in pencil Henry V. Dicks, dated 1937, to front fly-leaf; a little offsetting from endpapers; otherwise a very good copy of an uncommon book.
First edition. Born in England in 1915 and a friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor at a Canterbury school, Watts settled in California.He is 'credited with introducing and popularizing Eastern philosophy and religion among Western audiences in the mid-20th century. Watts was widely recognized for his ability to convey ideas and perspectives associated with Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, and other Eastern traditions through writings that were entertaining and accessible to general readers in the West. His writings became influential, helping to spur the counterculture of the 1960s in the United States and Great Britain and making Watts one of the most widely discussed philosophers of his time. In a review of his work, the Los Angeles Times famously described Watts as “perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West” who displayed “the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the un-writable” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, online).
Provenance: Henry Victor Dicks (1900-1977) was an eminent British psychiatrist, Assistant Medical Director at Tavistock Clinic in London, and in charge of Rudolf Hess, the infamous Nazi leader who had flown to Scotland in May, 1941.
#2119817