The Definitely Definitive Reading List of First-Wave Psychonauts

Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Albert Hofmann, and Ralph Metzner at the LSD—A Generation Later Colloquium (photo by Steve Gladstone).

To complement our Bicycle Day Book Club reading of Albert Hofmann’s LSD—My Problem Child, here’s a short of list of books by and about pioneering psychonauts and psychedelic scientists of the mid-twentieth century. It covers the early cohorts of LSD experimenters running from the 1940s to the early ‘70s, as well as figures like R. Gordon Wasson, who helped introduce ancient plant and fungal entheogens to the modern West. The list is arranged alphabetically by author.

Artaud, Antonin, The Peyote Dance

Bisbee, Cynthia, et al. (eds.), Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond

Boon, Marcus, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

Burroughs, William S. and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters

Dodgson, Rick, It’s All a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey

Druch, Theodore, Timothy Leary and the Mad Men of Millbrook

Furlong, Monica, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts

Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems 1947-1997

Greenfield, Robert, Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III

Greenfield, Robert, Timothy Leary: A Biography

Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research

Grof, Stanislav, The Way of the Psychonaut, Volumes One and Two: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys

Hagenbach, Dieter and Lucius Werthmüller, Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD

Higgs, John, I Have America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary

Hofmann, Albert, LSD—My Problem Child

Hofmann, Albert, LSD and the Divine Scientist

Hollingshead, Michael, The Man Who Turned on the World

Horowitz, Michael and Cynthia Palmer (eds.), Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception

Huxley, Aldous, Island

Huxley, Aldous, The Divine Within

Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy

Jarnow, Jesse, Heads, A Biography of Psychedelic America

Kleps, Art, Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism

Lattin, Don, The Harvard Psychedelic Club

Leary, Timothy, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience

Leary, Timothy, The Politics of Ecstasy

Leary, Timothy, Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching

Leary, Timothy, Your Brain Is God

Lee, Martin and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD

Lilly, John C., Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space

Lilly, John C., Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer

Lilly, John C., The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography

Metzner, Ralph, Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanácatl

Metzner, Ralph, Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca

Metzner, Ralph, The Toad and the Jaguar

Minutaglio, Bill and Steven Davis, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD (Supposedly being adapted into a limited-run series.)

Parker, Scott, Conversations with Ken Kesey

Piper, Alan, et al. (eds.), Strange Drugs Makes For Strange Bedfellows: Ernst Junger, Albert Hofmann and the Politics of Psychedelics

Ram Dass, Be Here Now

Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties

Roberts, Andy, Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain

Roberts, Andy, Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead

Schou, Nick, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg

Slack, Charles, Timothy Leary, the Madness of the Sixties and Me

Stanley, Rhoney Gissen, Owsley and Me: My LSD Family

Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream

Stolaroff, Myron, The Secret Chief Revealed

Stolaroff, Myron, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration

Tendler, Stewart and David May, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia

Wasson, R. Gordon, et al., Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries

Wasson, R. Gordon, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

Wasson, R. Gordon, The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica

Watts, Alan, The Joyous Cosmology

Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test



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