Theodore Roszak (scholar)


Theodore Roszak was an American academic who ended his career as Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text The Making of a Counter Culture.

Background

Roszak received his B.A. from University of California, Los Angeles. He then received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 1958 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Thomas Cromwell and the Henrican reformation." He taught at Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, and San Francisco State University before joining Cal State Hayward. During the 1960s, he lived in London, where he edited the newspaper Peace News. He was featured prominently in the "Alternative Lifestyles in California" episode of the 1977 BBC television series, The Long Search.
Theodore Roszak died at age 77 at his home in Berkeley, California, on July 5, 2011.

Scholarship

Roszak first came to public prominence in 1969, with the publication of his The Making of a Counter Culture which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. He is generally credited with the first use of the term "counterculture".
Other books include Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders, The Voice of the Earth, Person/Planet, The Cult of Information, The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science. He also co-edited the anthology Ecopsychology: Healing the Mind, Restoring the Earth, and the anthology Masculine/Feminine: Essays on Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women.
His fiction includes a cult novel on the "secret history" of the cinema titled Flicker and the award-winning Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. His final novel, published in 2003, is The Devil and Daniel Silverman.

Awards and honors

Non-fiction