In September 2003, he gave the Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Fogarty International Center at NIH on the Global Epidemic of Depression and Suicide.
Perhaps Kleinman's most influential work is Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980), followed by The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988) and Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (1986).
His book, What Really Matters (Oxford University Press, 2006), addresses existential dangers and uncertainties that make moral experience, religion, and ethics so crucial to individuals and society today.
His most recent book The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor was published by Penguin in 2019.
Kleinman is the co-author of four books including A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering (2016) with Iain Wilkinson and Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person.
Kleinman has co-authored many works with other psychiatrists, anthropologists and researchers in the field of global health including the late Paul Farmer (his former student), Veena Das, Margaret Lock, Michael Phillips, Byron Good, Mary Del-Vecchio Good, Tsung-yi Lin and Leon Eisenberg (his former teacher).
Kleinman is co-editor of 29 volumes, including: Social Suffering; Culture and Depression; SARS in China; Global Pharmaceuticals; Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations; Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction; The Culture of Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa; and The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy.
He has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).
He was married to the late Joan Kleinman (who died in 2011), a sinologist and his research collaborator, for 45 years.