Wayne Dyer: Detroit Orphan, Station Wagon Book Tours and Plagiarism Claims

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Wayne Dyer was born in Detroit in 1940. His father walked out, leaving his mother with three small boys, and Wayne spent about a decade in orphanages and foster care before a strict but loving couple adopted him. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1958, served four years, then earned a bachelor's, a master's and, in 1970, a doctorate in counseling from Wayne State University. After work as a high school guidance counselor he taught at St. John's University in New York, where his lectures on positive thinking drew a literary agent. His 1976 bestseller on self-defeating behavior taught readers to reject guilt, which he called a paralyzing immobilization over the past and a tool institutions and families use for control. He quit his tenured job, loaded his station wagon with copies and booked himself on local radio across the country.

Albert Ellis, creator of Rational Emotive Therapy and its ABC model, said Dyer's book drew on his work and noted Dyer had attended one of his workshops. Dyer never credited him, and Ellis chose not to sue, later conceding the book was effective. By the 1990s Dyer had moved from psychology to intention and manifestation, citing Lao Tzu, Swami Muktananda and Saint Francis of Assisi, appearing on PBS pledge specials and with Oprah, and working with Deepak Chopra. In 2010 translator Stephen Mitchell sued over lines from his Tao Te Ching translation; the case was dismissed in 2011 after a settlement. Dyer was diagnosed with leukemia in 2009 and died of a heart attack in Hawaii in 2015 at 75.

• Dyer distinguished healthy remorse, which leads to amends and change, from guilt that keeps a person stuck.
• He had eight children across three marriages, and his third marriage ended in legal separation before the couple reunited.
• He rejected organized religion and urged people to emulate Christ or Buddha rather than wear a religious label.
• His lecture on fearing the unknown was excerpted in the 2010 Pixar short Day and Night.
• In the early 1980s he described the critical inch, a small pause in which to consider one's purpose.