Who was Carlos Castaneda?

Carlos Castañeda (December 25, 1925 – April 27, 1998) was a Peruvian-American author.

Castaneda's first three books — "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge", "A Separate Reality," and "Journey to Ixtlan" — were written while he was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He claimed that these books were ethnographic accounts describing his apprenticeship with a traditional "Man of Knowledge" identified as don Juan Matus, allegedly a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico. The veracity of these books was doubted from their original publication, and they are now widely considered to be fictional. Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees based on the work described in these books.

In 1974 his fourth book, "Tales of Power", was published and chronicled the end of his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Matus. Castaneda continued to be popular with the reading public with subsequent publications that unfolded further aspects of his training with don Juan.