He said he could accept such a seemingly grandiose title only because many

He said he could "accept such a seemingly grandiose title only because many have pointed out that a prophet is not someone who can see the future, but merely someone who can read the signs of the times". He thought that one of those signs was that by the time the book was published many Americans were in psychotherapy or were in "Twelve Step Programmes", such as Alcoholics Anonymous.Peck was concerned about what life means. The nihilistic view, he said, "assumes that there is no meaning and, consequently, it doesn't matter what the fuck you do". Then there is what he "loosely" called the existential view, "which holds that there's no reason to conclude that there is any meaning to life" and one should live "as if life were meaningless"; this "is too horrible and destructive to consider". His own view was that life really does have meaning "and part of the reason we're here is to try to figure out what the meaning is".Morgan Scott Peck was born in 1936, in New York, to an affluent secular family His father was a successful lawyer and judge. "Scottie" attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an expensive fee-paying school, but left at the age of 15 against his parents' wishes as he was unhappy there, and he finished at a Quaker prep school in Manhattan. He took a course in world religions and "fell in love with Hinduism and Buddhism".

When he was 18 he "was a Zen Buddhist - way before it was fashionable".He entered Middlebury College, in Vermont, where it was mandatory to do Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which trains American college students to become military officers. During his second year he became one of the first ROTC protesters against the military and was expelled for refusing to attend ROTC sessions. He transferred to Harvard, where he majored in psychology, and took a second, medical, degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.He did his psychiatric residency in the military. He underwent psychotherapy in his last year of residency, "not because it would be a learning experience", but because he "needed" it.

He spent nearly 10 years as an army psychiatrist, which he admitted was an odd choice given his college experience. He said that he became opposed to the Vietnam War soon after joining the army, but alleged later that his military experience was a way to study the behaviour of individuals and organisations.Peck was attracted to his first wife, Lily Ho from Singapore, "perhaps because she was Chinese and had a sort of exoticness". They married when he was a medical student, against their parents' wishes. He said his parents had raised him to be "the ultimate Wasp" (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and now he was "marrying a Chink". They told him he was ruining his life, that he would have no friends They disinherited him "Her parents were equally bad. They were furious because they had lost control." He and Lily had three children - to whom he expressed gratefulness in print for having "suffered from their father's workaholism". The marriage ended in divorce, and he later remarried.His conversion to Christianity occurred in 1980, when he was 43.

He underwent a baptism at a non-denominational ceremony performed by a Methodist minister in an Episcopalian convent. He said he became a Christian as he "wrestled with the ideas of sin and guilt, remorse and contrition". Christianity dealt with those in ways that "made sense" to him. He once said that his commitment to Christianity was "the most important thing" in his life and was, he hoped, "pervasive and total".Peck's other books include a novel, A Bed by the Window (1990), and a "fable", The Friendly Snowflake (1992), as well as Further Along the Road Less Traveled (1993) and The Road Less Traveled and Beyond (1997). His People of the Lie (1983) was subtitled "the hope for healing human evil", and he also wrote The Different Drum: community-making and peace (1987), which tried to diagnose the ills of communities, America and the world.Morton Schatzman.