Ken Keyes Jr

Ken Keyes Jr. (January 19, 1921 – December 20, 1995) was an American personal growth author and lecturer, and the creator of the Living Love method, a self-help system. Keyes wrote fifteen books on personal growth and social consciousness issues, representing about four million copies distributed overall.

Keyes was born an only child to an affluent family in Atlanta. Throughout their lives, he was close to his father and especially to his mother, despite her eventual abuse of alcohol. He suffered from chronic bronchitis and croup in his infant years, and in 1925 his family moved to Miami Beach, Florida in hopes of his benefiting from its sunny climate. His father, Kenneth Keyes Sr., became successful in real estate development there and active in the conservative evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church. Keyes was not very athletic as a child, but excelled in academics and developed hobbies, such as photography. When he was in high school, his father bought him a small boat, which began his lifelong interest in sailing.

Keyes attributed the seeds of the personal growth system he would later develop to an experience he had with a stern English teacher in ninth grade. Despite her reputation as a strict teacher and hard grader, he made an effort to be personally caring toward her, which led to her giving him a slight break in grading. He took the lesson from this experience to be "that when I express caring and friendliness, they are reflected back to me in life."

Keyes entered Duke University in 1938 and spent two years there. He then studied voice and music at the University of Miami, and helped to found the Miami Opera Guild. In 1941, during the World War II era, Keyes enlisted in a naval intelligence unit set up to censor cablegrams entering and leaving the United States.

At age of 20, Keyes met his first wife, Roberta Rymer, at the University of Miami. They were married in December 1941, a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their first child, Ken III, was born in December 1942, and their second child, Clara Lu, was born in April 1944. Keyes was discharged from the service in October 1945, and entered the real estate business with his father.

When he was around 23, he photographed and filmed Alfred Korzybski at the Institute of General Semantics, helping to document Korzybski's life. Apparently he was already greatly involved in the logical aspects of self-help.

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