Wayne Dyer was an American psychologist, psychotherapist, writer, and motivational speaker who worked across the fields of self-help and personal development throughout his career.

Born in Detroit on May 10, 1940, Dyer attended Denby High School before going on to study at Wayne State University, the institution where he built his academic foundation in psychology. His early years in Detroit shaped the trajectory that would eventually take him far from his Midwestern roots, both professionally and personally.

Dyer wrote Your Erroneous Zones, a book that brought his ideas about self-defeating thinking to a wide readership. Alongside his work as a writer, he maintained a career as a motivational speaker, taking his ideas in front of live audiences and contributing to public conversations around psychology and personal well-being. His background as both a psychologist and a psychotherapist gave his writing and speaking a clinical grounding that set it apart from much of the self-help field at the time.

He also worked as an actor at various points in his career, adding another dimension to a public life that extended well beyond academic or clinical settings. Dyer remained a citizen of the United States throughout his life, and by the time of his death he had settled far from the city where he was born. He died on August 29, 2015, in Maui, at the age of seventy-five. His body of work, rooted in psychology and personal development, and his writing — most notably Your Erroneous Zones — represent the consistent throughline of a career that moved between the page, the stage, and the screen.