Irvin D. Yalom

Born June 13, 1931, Irvin David Yalom built a career at Stanford University as a psychiatrist who refused to treat the mind as mere mechanics. He imported existentialism — mortality, meaning, isolation, freedom — into the consulting room and made it stick. Then he did something unusual: he wrote it all down, first as nonfiction that taught a generation of therapists how to think, then as novels where patients became characters and sessions became plots. He's now an emeritus professor, still writing, still insisting that confronting the hardest questions might be the only honest cure.