James Bender Swartz

James Swartz was born in Butte, Montana, in 1941. He grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and had a very happy childhood. The small world of Lewiston could not contain him, however, and at seventeen he left for a military prep school in Minnesota. He spent two years in a liberal arts college in Wisconsin, was expelled for disciplinary reasons and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. Six months short of graduation he ran off to Hawaii, where he started a successful small business. But something was terribly wrong; at twenty-six he had become an alcoholic, chain-smoking, gluttonous adulterer, and life in every respect was not worth living. One day in the post office in Waikiki he had a life-changing epiphany that put him on the path to freedom. For more about that remarkable journey, read Mystic by Default.