Derek Humphry
| Derek Humphry | |
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Derek Humphry in 2009
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| Born |
29 April 1930 Bath, England |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Notable awards | Martin Luther King Memorial Prize (1972), Saba Prize (2000) |
| Website | |
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Derek Humphry (born 29 April 1930) is a British-born American journalist, author and principal founder in 1980 of the Hemlock Society USA and past president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, both of which support the notion of decriminalization of voluntary euthanasia. He is the author of Jean's Way and the best-seller Final Exit; he is also the president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization and advisor to the Final Exit Network. He lives in Junction City, Oregon.
Born to a British father and an Irish mother, he was raised in Somerset. His education was slender because of a broken home followed by World War II, when many English schools were in chaos, finally leaving at the age of 15, when he became a messenger boy for the Yorkshire Post. In a 30-year journalistic career Humphry worked and wrote for the Bristol Evening World, the Manchester Evening News, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and, lastly, the Los Angeles Times.
His first wife, Jean Humphry, ended her life on 29 March 1975, in The Cotswolds with her husband at her side, with an intentional overdose of medication; she was suffering from terminal breast cancer. He told that story from his perspective in the best-selling Jean's Way. Derek and Jean Humphry had three sons, the youngest one an adoptee.
Humphry wrote the 1991 suicide handbook, Final Exit. From 1993 onwards Humphry has been president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization (ERGO), and chairs the advisory board of the new Final Exit Network (formed 2004 to replace the Hemlock Society dissolved the previous year in mergers).
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