Huston Smith

Huston Cummings Smith was an American scholar of religious studies who lived from 1919 to 2016. Born and raised in Suzhou, China, to an American Methodist missionary family, he moved to the United States at seventeen and earned a doctorate in religious studies, focusing on the philosophy of religion, from the University of Chicago in 1945. He spent his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Syracuse University before retiring in 1983 to Berkeley, California, where he remained a visiting professor of religious studies at the University of California, Berkeley, until his death. He wrote at least thirteen books on the world's religions and philosophy, including the comparative religion survey The World's Religions, originally titled The Religions of Man, which had sold over three million copies as of 2017.