Ten Books by Novelists that Shaped Maslow's Worldview

Abraham Maslow was an inveterate reader. Beginning in his Brooklyn childhood as the oldest son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants, libraries for him were a source of intellectual delight, as well as a refuge from family conflict and regimented public schooling. In later life, Maslow recalled, perhaps apocryphally, “I read every book in the children’s library. When I finished, they gave me an adult card.” Perusing New York City’s plentiful used bookshops during the Depression regaled Maslow, so much so that when affluent enough to acquire only new purchases, he lamented the loss of these browsing adventures.

During Maslow’s significant career, he was influenced, of course, by many books. As his biographer, I alluded to some of these in The Right to Be Human. However, having continued to explicate his life and compelling ideas, I’d like to highlight here books specifically by novelists that shaped his worldview. Why novelists? Because the impact of such psychological thinkers as Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Goldstein, and Max Wertheimer has been well-documented; likewise for anthropologist Ruth Benedict and sociologists Pitirim Sorokin and David Riesman. However, little scholarship has yet focused on the impact of novelists on Maslow’s evolving, visionary system of psychology.

More broadly, Maslow’s penchant for “novelists of ideas” like Aldous Huxley and Robert Heinlein, as well as speculative fiction in general, sheds light on a major source of his creative inspiration. For unlike Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud, Maslow did not draw upon case studies with patients. Nor did he engage in art and sculpture to find his muse, as did Carl Jung. Rather, primary for Maslow were the wide-ranging books he read, as well as events in his daily life with family and friends, to advance his concepts of the healthy individual—and crucially, the healthy society. No “private utopias” for him.

In creating this list, I’ve relied on Maslow’s posthumously published private journals, unpublished essays, and publications. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve grouped these books into five broad categories: social justice, authenticity and self-actualization, altruistic leadership, the spiritual path, and utopianism or eupsychia (Maslow’s term for the best society that humanity could achieve). Maslow was seldom clear on when he had first read each book, listed below in order of publication date by category.

1. Social Justice

Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854). As a high-school student raised in a neighborhood with other immigrant families, Maslow was moved by this compelling novel of social reform. It depicted the plight of England’s working poor during the Industrial Revolution by focusing on the fictitious Coketown, whose struggling residents felt like “cogs in a vast machine” in Dickens’ memorable phrase. Hard Times awakened young Maslow’s idealism and belief in the power of education, as well as attracted him to socialism.

Mammonart by Upton Sinclair (1925). A second major influence on teenage Maslow was this work of literary criticism by America’s famed muckraking novelist, perhaps best known for The Jungle. Predicated on Sinclair’s aphorism that “All art is propaganda,” Mammonart highlighted how many of Western history’s celebrated writers and artists helped to perpetuate the socio-economic status quo of their time, either by willful action or uncaring inaction. This book influenced Maslow’s later, strongly-held view that “art for art’s sake” is morally abhorrent in a world rampant with human suffering.

2. Authenticity and Self-Actualization

Odd John by Olaf Stapledon (1935). An English philosopher who focused on ultimate questions about human potential and community, Stapledon adopted science fiction to express his views most effectively. In this context, Odd John was Stapledon’s effort to chronicle the isolation and struggles of a man naturally endowed with superhuman intelligence, yet otherwise normal in all other ways. This novel was particularly influential in shaping Maslow’s perspective that great talent often comes at a high price by evoking resentment from others—requiring “camouflage” for personal well-being and even social survival.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943). Like Stapledon, the Russian émigré Rand utilized fiction to advance her American philosophical outlook (which she called “objectivism” and which has powerfully influenced libertarianism). Still popular after 80 years, this novel exerted a lifelong impact on Maslow with its portrayal of a brilliant, idealistic, and uncompromising architect. He found especially inspiring its description of the absolute refusal of its protagonist to embrace mediocrity in return for fame, money, or power. In Maslow’s private journals, he expressed a more ambivalent view of Rand’s later writings and politics.

3. Altruistic Leadership

Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley (1941). An acclaimed English “novelist of ideas” whose Brave New World remains a staple of dystopian fiction, Huxley gradually shifted his interest to mystical experiences and the human potential—eventually bringing him to endorse psychedelics as a mind-expanding methodology in such works as The Doors of Perception. Grey Eminence stands at the very beginning of Huxley’s intellectual odyssey, as a literary biography of Father Joseph of Paris, a seventeenth-century Capuchin monk who was a practicing mystic as well as a chief aide to the ruthless French leader Cardinal Richelieu during the Thirty Years War. For Maslow, this book stimulated considerable thought on the nature of individual power as a force for societal betterment or destruction.

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Spinster by Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1958). An iconoclastic New Zealand novelist and essayist, Sylvia Ashton-Warner was trained as an educator. In teaching Maori (indigenous Polynesian) pupils in the late 1930s, she and her husband Keith Dawson developed a unique pedagogy that emphasized children’s own experiences as the key to learning. A fictionalized account of this work, Spinster became an American best-seller and was later adapted into a Hollywood feature film. Maslow found it a wonderful evocation of mindful teaching at its best. In Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he cited the protagonist’s comment while instructing reading to her class: “I am utterly lost in the present.”

4. The Spiritual Path

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (1922). The German-Swiss Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, was long drawn to both Jungian psychology and Buddhism. Not surprisingly, therefore, this novel of an accomplished Brahmin youth who defied his father’s tradition to wander India in search of enlightenment had great appeal for Maslow. Combining themes of individuality, self-discipline, communion with nature, and the idea of divine imminence, Siddhartha buttressed Maslow’s long predilection for Daosim with a growing interest in Buddhist thought and practice. In Maslow’s final years, he regarded the notion of the bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism as particularly important.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899). Tolstoy’s last and darkest novel addressed the immense social misery of nineteenth-century Russia and the role of institutional religion in its perpetuation. Indeed, the publication of this novel led to Tolstoy’s ex-communication by the Holy Synod from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Maslow cried in reading Tolstoy’s depiction of how organized Christianity had subverted its founder’s original, simple message of love. Maslow’s takeaway: “I must take much more seriously…how to communicate meaningfully (his italics).”

5. Utopianism and Eupsychia

Beyond This Horizon by Robert Heinlein (1942 ). Maslow valued science fiction for its openness to new paradigms about life, as well as its sense of wonder. In this light, he was an avid reader of works by Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and especially Robert Heinlein. The latter’s third novel, Beyond This Horizon, posited a future in which humanity had conquered all such historic problems as disease, starvation, poverty, and war. But in doing so, humanity had inadvertently created a new problem: mass boredom. Dating back to Maslow’s research with primates, he had been interested in what he later called the meta-pathology of chronic boredom. Heinlein’s provocative novel reinforced Maslow’s view that highly industrialized countries like the US were failing to grapple with this looming mental health issue.

Island by Aldous Huxley (1962). By the time Huxley’s novel was published, he and Maslow had become friends, each delighting in the other’s visionary brilliance. Huxley died the following year, but Maslow continued to extol this utopian tale set in the contemporary world and assigned it as required reading for his college students. Optimistically describing a wonderful, peaceful society on a Pacific island, Huxley described its social-sexual mores, meditative and spiritual practices, and especially its radical pedagogy. And, as Maslow admiringly told his class soon after Island was published, “This utopia is unusual in one respect: not only is the society described but also the history is detailed of how it got there.”

For those seeking to help complete Maslow’s unfinished legacy, these ten books—all written by novelists—provide clear and meaningful direction.

*Special thanks to Tass Bey for his conceptual contributions.