Carlos Castaneda
No matter that Carlos Castaneda was born in Peru and immigrated to America at the age of twenty-six (or twenty) he considered to be the American writer and ethnographer. For thirteen years Carlos Castaneda was learning the main regulation of initiating to shamans. There are not much data about his life, the only source one may find out about Castaneda's life from are the books written by him. Though, Carlos Castaneda was a Toltec and Toltec believed that the personal history of the men is of no importance, so one may not be sure about those facts Castaneda mentioned in his books. It's only known that Carlos Castaneda died at the age of 73, he suffered with cancer and that was the reason of his death. After he died the body was cremated and the ashes sent to Mexico. According to some sources Castaneda was married but his marriage lasted only for six month. There is even no accurate datum about the day of his birth. According to the act of civil status Castaneda was born December 25th in 1925, but according to encyclopaedia of modern authors he was born December 25th in 1931. As it's so one may not be sure about the age he died at, in case if the data of act of civil status is wrong Castaneda died at the age of 67.
Any way the dates of Castaneda's birth and death are not as important as contribution she made to literature as whole and to the genre of philosophy as single taken. There were a lot of efforts made in order to protest his works, to find plagiarism in his books and words or different kinds of contradictions of his thoughts. There was a man whose name was Don Juan Matus who is considered to be the teacher of Carlos Castaneda, but no one managed to find him or any data concerning him. There were people who assured that according to Castaneda's wife's words matus is a sort of wine Carlos and his wife used to drink. Anyway, no matter on that numerous efforts to protest the words of Carlos Castaneda he remains one of the greatest writers and his works did influenced the mood of literature and minds of many poets and writers.
Thoughts and ideas of Carlos Castaneda greatly impressed Pablo Coelho and influenced his works that are also philosophic just as Castaneda's works. Some of the people, who hardly realise who was Carlos Castaneda and what a great contribution he made, blame him as propagandist of drugs and drug addiction. That is the result of that fact that those people read only first to books of Castaneda where he wrote about psychedelics. That is rather unfair and stupid opinion about works of great writer, as there is no chance for primitive propagandist to change the mood of the literature of the whole age and to be adored by great number of people.