Ram Dass was born on April 6, 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts, at a time when the city stood as one of the main centers of American academic life. He attended the Williston Northampton School before moving on to study at Tufts University, Wesleyan University, and Stanford University, a sequence of institutions that placed him firmly within the formal educational world of mid-twentieth-century America. That path through multiple universities gave him a foundation as a psychologist and university teacher, roles he carried into the professional work that followed.

Over the course of his career, Ram Dass worked across several overlapping vocations — psychologist, philosopher, writer, spiritual teacher, and guru — each sitting alongside the others in a body of work that resisted easy categorization. He worked in English throughout, and the Library of Congress Name Authority carries his name under the authorized label Ram Dass, reflecting the identity he adopted and sustained publicly over many decades. As a writer, he brought those various roles together in forms that could reach audiences beyond the university setting where his career had begun.

He continued working as a spiritual teacher and writer well into his later years, drawing on his background in psychology and philosophy across a career that spanned more than half a century. In that time he remained a citizen of the United States, moving between the roles of academic, writer, and guru that had defined his public presence. Ram Dass died on December 22, 2019, in Maui, Hawaii, where he had been based in the final chapter of his life, at the age of eighty-eight.