Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924 – March 6, 1974) was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

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 student demonstrations.

In 1969, Becker began a professorship at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, where he spent the final years of his academic life.

[6] Becker's insistence on interdisciplinary work, along with the fact that students flocked to his lectures, which were marked by a high level of theatricality, did not endear him to many of his colleagues.

To list just a few of these thinkers who helped formulate many of his theories, many point to how Becker draws on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O.

The Birth and Death of Meaning, published in 1962 and then extensively revised and republished in 1971,[citation needed] was "Becker's first attempt to explain the human condition.

[10][11] During this early period, Becker was formulating a "fully transactional" view of mental health that eventually formed the basis of his book, Revolution in Psychiatry (1964).

[6] Becker eventually came to the position that psychological inquiry can only bring us to a distinct threshold beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche.

Escape From Evil (1975) was intended as a significant extension of the line of reasoning begun in The Denial of Death, developing the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book.