Timothy Leary, son of Timothy and Abigail Ferris Leary, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 22 October 1920. He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, as had his father. He received a B.A. from the University of Alabama in 1943 and an M.S. degree from Washington State University in 1946. In 1950 he received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of both Phi Beta Kappa and the Sigma Xi science honorary.

During the 1950s, when the Beats gained notoriety as a vocal minority railing against what they saw as the stultification of the so-called straight, consumer society and the American way of life, Timothy Leary was, in many respects, living within the value system that the outraged bohemians found so abhorrent. He was then pursuing a quiet but successful career as a clinical psychologist. Between 1954 and 1959, he...