For listeners who may not know the name Carlos Castaneda, since he did die almost 30 years ago back in 1998, who was he and why did he become such a phenomenon?

Sure.

Carlos Castaneda began his rise to fame in 1968 when the University of California published a book titled The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which purported to tell of this young anthropologist's initiation with a Yaqui shaman in using datura and peyote and mushrooms into an entire kind of way of knowledge that supposedly had never before been revealed to a Westerner.

And the book was at first kind of an underground bestseller.

It soon became an international bestseller.

And for about five years, at least publicly, was accepted or went basically unquestioned as a legitimate work of anthropology.

And yeah, he had an enormous number of fans, especially among the kind of the culturati and the literati and people like John Lennon and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Federico Fellini.

B- b- I'm really intrigued by it because you're saying that, uh, this creation, Don Juan, and these books that he was writing, were he, was he using these for his academic, uh, e- exploits as well?

Great

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Carlos Castaneda rose to fame starting in nineteen sixty-eight when University of California published his first book, which was titled The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and it supposedly told of his studies in the Sonoran Desert with a, uh, Yaqui indigenous shaman, Don Juan, who, using peyote, datura, and mushrooms, introduces him to this entire way of knowledge that supposedly has never before been shared with a, a quote unquote "Westerner." And, um, it, it started out as kind of an underground bestseller, but very quickly became, became an international bestseller, and he's among the, you know, top two or three, um, best-selling non-fiction authors, non-fiction in quotes, of the nineteen seventies.

And for about five years, although people sometimes have a hard time believing this now, uh, there were, there were always kind of mumblings and rumblings, you know, uh, about whether th-this work was, was for real.

They basically went pretty much publicly unchallenged.

He got rave reviews in The New York Times, Harper's, The Nation, you know, what have you.

It's not until nineteen seventy-two that, um, this person named, um, Joyce Carol Oates writes a letter to the editor of The New York Times and says, "Am I, am I the only person who thinks that these are novels?" But there, there's never...

Hmm.