Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak (Chicago, 1933 – Berkeley, 2011) was an American academic and novelist who ended his career as professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), a book that explained the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s and is generally credited with giving that term its currency.

Born in Chicago to a Catholic family, he attended the city's public schools, earned his bachelor's degree at UCLA in 1955 and a PhD in history from Princeton in 1958. He taught at Stanford and then at Cal State Hayward, and in the mid-1960s lived in London, where he edited the newspaper Peace News.

His career as a nonfiction writer took off in 1966, when he began contributing to The Nation and The Atlantic. His essays dealt with ecology, technology and the psychology of culture, and in The Voice of the Earth he coined the term ecopsychology. He nonetheless saw fiction as his true vocation, producing novels such as Flicker and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which won the Tiptree Award in 1995.

His legacy lies largely in the way current debates on counterculture, ecology and the critique of technology are framed around ideas he helped to articulate.