About the Author
His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda appeared in this world in 1896 in Calcutta, India. He first met his spiritual master, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Goswami, in Calcutta in 1922. Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta, the foremost scholar and devotee of his time, had founded the Gauḍīya Maṭha (a Vedic institute with sixty-four branches throughout India). He liked this educated young man and convinced him to dedicate his life to teaching Vedic knowledge. Śrīla Prabhupāda became his student, and eleven years later (1933) at Allahabad he became his formally initiated disciple.
At their first meeting, in 1922, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Thākura requested Śrīla Prabhupāda to broadcast Vedic knowledge through the English language. In the years that followed, Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote a commentary on the  Bhagavad-gītā , the most important Vedic text, and he assisted the Gauḍīya Maṭha in its work. In 1944 he singlehandedly started an English fortnightly magazine called  Back to Godhead . He edited and typed the manuscripts, checked the galley proofs, and even distributed the copies for free and struggled to maintain the publication.
Recognizing Śrīla Prabhupāda's philosophical learning and devotion, the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Society honored him in 1947 with the title "Bhaktivedanta." In 1950, at age fifty-four, Śrīla Prabhupāda retired from family life. Four years later he adopted the  vānaprastha  (retired) order to devote more time to his studies and writing, and soon he traveled to the holy city of Vṛndāvana. There he lived in a small room in the historic Rādhā-Dāmodara temple and engaged in several years of deep study and writing. In 1959 he accepted the renounced order of life ( san-nyāsa ). At Rādhā-Dāmodara, Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote  Easy Journey to Other Planets  and started his life's masterpiece—a multivolume translation of and commentary on the eighteen-thousand-verse  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam , the cream of the Vedic literatures.
After publishing three volumes of the  Bhāgavatam , Śrīla Prabhupāda came to the United States in 1965 to fulfill the mission of his spiritual master. After that time, His Divine Grace wrote some eighty volumes of authoritative translations, commentaries, and summary studies of the philosophical and religious classics of India. When he first arrived by freighter in New York City, Śrīla Prabhupāda was practically penniless. But after nearly a year of great difficulty, he founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in July of 1966. Before his much-lamented passing on November 14, 1977, he guided the Society and saw
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