Evans-Wentz

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (February 2, 1878 – July 17, 1965) was an American anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism, and in transmission of Tibetan Buddhism to the Western world, most known for publishing an early English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927. Today, Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa (1928), Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954).

He was born as Walter Yeeling Wentz in Trenton, New Jersey in 1878. His father was a real estate businessman, of German descent, while his mother was Irish. He had two brothers and two sisters. Though initially a Baptist, his father had turned to spiritualism and Theosophy. As a teenager he read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine at his father's library and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy and the occult. Subsequently, at the turn of century, he moved to San Diego, California to join his father's profession, but also because it was close to Lomaland, the American headquarters for the Theosophical Society, which he joined in 1901.

At age 24 Evans-Wentz went to Stanford University, where he studied religion, philosophy, and history and was deeply influenced by visitors William James and W. B. Yeats. He went on to receive B.A. and M.A degrees. He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford (1907). He performed ethnographic fieldwork collecting fairy folklore in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man. In 1911 Evans-Wentz published his degree thesis as a book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. While at Oxford, he added his mother's Welsh surname Evans to his name, being known henceforth as Evans-Wentz.

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