In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915-1965

Alan Watts's 1972 autobiography, published by Pantheon Books, covering his life from his 1915 birth in Kent through 1965, including his Anglican ordination and departure, his American Academy of Asian Studies years, his early KPFA broadcasts and his first marriages. It is a legitimate source for Watts's own account of his own choices, useful precisely because no biographer can report what a subject privately believed his own motives to be. Its named limit is double: it is self-reported, so where it and Monica Furlong's independent biography differ on the balance of a decision, the atlas treats the self-account as evidence of what Watts wanted remembered rather than as the settled fact; and it stops in 1965, eight years before his 1973 death, so it says nothing in his own voice about The Joyous Cosmology's psychedelic period, his final years of heavy drinking, or his own account of his decline, all of which come from other people's testimony instead.