Geoff Gilpin

Geoff Gilpin (born September 22, 1953) is an American author of creative nonfiction and computer science books. His best-known book is The Maharishi Effect: A Personal Journey Through the Movement That Transformed American Spirituality, published by Tarcher-Penguin in 2006. It is an award-winning journalistic memoir about Transcendental Meditation, which attracted millions of Americans in the 1970s and introduced Eastern spirituality to mainsteam American culture.

Gilpin grew up in Hartford and Rocky Hill, Connecticut; Wichita, Kansas; and Appleton, Wisconsin. He was a young adult studying video production in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1973 when he discovered Transcendental Meditation, which was sweeping the United States as a fad at the time. As described in The Maharishi Effect, he spent the next five years as an active participant in the Transcendental Meditation movement, led by guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He graduated from Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, in 1978.

He then studied computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and worked in the computer industry for most of two decades as an analyst, programmer, and technical writer. His book Ada: A Guided Tour and Tutorial (Prentice Hall Press, 1986) became a standard guide to Ada, a programming language used by the United States Department of Defense. From 1994 to 1998 Gilpin was a co-owner of The Software Resource Publications, Inc., a software documentation company based in Madison, Wisconsin.

After earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction degree from Goucher College in 2000, he returned to Iowa to research developments in the Transcendental Meditation movement. His resulting book, The Maharishi Effect, is a sympathetic yet critical, insider/outsider account of a major cultural phenomenon of the 1970s and its aftermath. It received the 2006 August Derleth Book-length Non-fiction Award, sponsored by the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

Bibliography
* Frank Bures, "Guru Reality." Isthmus (Madison, Wisconsin), Sept. 8, 2006, pp. 18-19.
* ISBN 978-0-13-004045-9 Geoff Gilpin, Ada: A Guided Tour and Tutorial (Prentice Hall Press, 1986).
* ISBN 978-1-58-542507-5 Geoff Gilpin, The Maharishi Effect: A Personal Journey Through the Movement That Transformed American Spirituality (Tarcher-Penguin, 2006).

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