ABSTRACT
Cancer is a condition of permanent biological confrontation in which dying becomes a way of life. Ernest Becker's extraordinary talent was the ability to translate experience into reason, the everyday expression of disaster into a social science expression of tragedy. In this regard, his final work, written and released just prior to the end, The Denial of Death, parallels that remarkable personal document by Stewart Alsop, Stay of Execution. Becker claimed as his domain the science of man, while those fragmented, or better, fractured social scientists, simply saw this preference as an occasion to exclude him from their specific domain. Psychiatry at Syracuse University, sociology at the University of California, and social psychology at San Francisco State College cast him loose. Ernest Becker's abilities as a teacher are legendary. Probably not since F. O. Mathiesson has the higher reaches of academia known such a powerful, charismatic teacher.
