Ernest Becker - Academic Career

Academic Career

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1960, Becker began his career as a teaching professor and writer. Becker taught at Syracuse University for a few years before eventually being fired in 1963 for siding with his mentor Thomas Szasz in the psychotherapy disputes. In 1965, Becker acquired a position at the University of California, Berkeley in the anthropology program. However, trouble again arose between him and the administration, leading to his departure from the university. At the time, thousands of students petitioned to keep Becker at the school and offered to pay his salary, but the petition did not succeed in retaining Becker. In 1967, he taught at San Francisco State’s Department of Psychology until January 1969 when he resigned in protest against the administration’s stringent policies against the student demonstrations.

In 1969, Becker began a professorship at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he would spend the remaining years of his academic life. During the next five years, he wrote his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Denial of Death. Additionally, he wrote the second edition to The Birth and Death of Meaning, and Escape from Evil. In November 1972, Ernest Becker was diagnosed with cancer.

Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. Referring to his insistence on the importance symbolism plays in the human animal, he wrote "I have tried to correct... bias by showing how deep theatrical "superficialities" really go". It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (two months after his death from cancer at the age of 49) for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, that he gained wider recognition. Escape From Evil (1975) was intended as a significant extension of the line of reasoning begun in Denial of Death, developing the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book. Although the manuscript's second half was left unfinished at the time of his death, it was completed from what manuscript existed as well as from notes on the unfinished chapter.