Gerald Heard
(1889 - 1971) U.K.
Writer
Born in England in 1889, educated at Cambridge, Heard became editor of the London Realist, a monthly of scientific humanism, in 1929. Gerald Heard began his career as an academic at Cambridge and then Oxford. He first became well known in the 1930's as an author of books on philosophy and as a BBC broadcaster on popular science and was acquainted with many of the leading intellectual and literary figures of the day.
In the late nineteen thirties, having been offered the chair of historical anthropology at Duke University, he went to the United States. Having become a committed pacifist, Heard, along with Aldous Leonard Huxley, emigrated to Los Angeles in 1937 and became a devotee of a Hindu religious order there. The writer Christopher Isherwood was attracted to follow Heard to California and soon he also joined the Hindu order, led by Swami Prabhavananda.
Since 1937, Heard has made his home in Santa Monica, California. As a writer, he is well known in the fields of religion, social behavior and psychology as well as anthropology. Due to his avowed pacifism, he never became a US citizen, despite living in California until his death 34 years later.
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