Robert Garnell Kaufman was born on April 18th, 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana. During his younger years, Kaufman had religious influences from all over in his family: his grandmother was a practitioner of voodoo, his father was German-Jewish, and his mother was Roman Catholic; However, he came to be interested in the eastern religions and later became a Buddhist. In 1958, Kaufman moved to San Francisco and quickly became enthralled by the 'surrealistic' lifestyles of the writers and poets of the West Coast. He founded a magazine called Beatitude in 1965. During the 1960's, Kaufman seemed to be more appealing to the European readers. Kaufman took a vow of silence when he witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which he did not break until the end of the Vietnam War. Some say that when he took his second vow of silence in 1978, he did not break it until his death on January 12th, 1986 in San Francisco, California.
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