Leo Buscaglia life and biography

Leo Buscaglia, also known as "Dr Love", was an author and motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California.

He gained fame on the USC campus through his non-credit course titled "Love 1A," which became the basis for his first book, titled simply LOVE. His dynamic speaking style was discovered by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and his televised lectures earned great popularity in the 1980s. At one point his talks, always shown during fund raising periods, were the top earners of all PBS programs. This national exposure, coupled with the heartfelt storytelling style of his books, helped make all of his titles national Best Sellers; five were once on the New York Times Best Sellers List simultaneously.

Buscaglia worked actively to overcome social and mental barriers that inhibited the expression of love between people, from family to acquaintances to people with disabilities, the institutionalized, and elderly, to complete strangers, often making his own forwardness on the subject a topic of self-deprecating humor. The profundity of his subject, however, almost invariably struck a responsive chord for many in an area frequently regarded as deficient in their lives, and by 1998 his books had reached eighteen million copies in print in seventeen languages.

Buscaglia died of a heart attack on June 12, 1998 at his home in Glenbrook, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe. He was 74.

Author of books:

Love (1972)
The Disabled and Their Parents (1975)
The Fall of Freddie The Leaf (1982)
Loving Each Other (1984)
Personhood: The Art of Fully Being Human (1986)
Living Loving and Learning (1990)

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