Kenneth Thurston Hurst (1923-2009) was PB’s only child. Kenneth’s middle name was chosen to honor one of PB’s earliest teachers, an American painter, whose first name was Thurston. His parents divorced when he was about six, and his mother remarried. However, he stayed in regular contact with his father throughout the years, who provided him with both spiritual and worldly advice.
Growing up in England in the ’30s and ’40s, Kenneth was strongly impacted by the events of WWII. Before the war’s end, he had joined the Royal Navy and received several decorations for his actions.
Kenneth eventually became involved with the business side of publishing, and rose to the position of President of Prentice-Hall International and spent many years traveling to various countries on behalf of Prentice-Hall and its authors.
Kenneth had regular correspondence with PB and assisted him with innumerable odd jobs over the years. Reading through some of the “to do” lists (in the PB archive) that his father sent while traveling the globe, we see how much PB relied upon Kenneth’s help.
Throughout his life Kenneth was active in many civic groups and spoke often on the ideas found in PB’s works in terms that were more familiar to his colleagues. He also gave talks to various spiritual groups around the world on PB’s teachings and on his own understanding of how to apply these ideas to daily life. After his retirement, Kenneth continued to give talks on mentalism, positive thinking, and spirituality. He was on the advisory boards of several organizations including the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies and the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship.
He visited PB in Switzerland regularly and was present at his death, along with Paul Cash. After this great loss, Kenneth relocated to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where Anthony and Ella May Damiani lived; he liked the area and built a house on the property adjacent to the Damiani’s and to Wisdom’s Goldenrod. It was his deep wish to preserve his father’s writing and to this end, in 1985, he co-founded the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation.
Kenneth had inherited the copyrights to all of PB’s books and unpublished material. When the PBPF was formed, he signed over all of the rights to PB’s unpublished works to the PBPF, and it has been our honor and responsibility to develop this material for publication (The Notebooks of Paul Brunton) and for proper archival preservation (now housed at Cornell University).
For many years, Kenneth was directly involved with the activities of the PBPF and only set that task aside when he felt the call to authorship himself. During this period he wrote several books, most notably Paul Brunton: A Personal View, whose title is self-explanatory. In his late sixties Kenneth had grown tired of New York winters and relocated to Naples, Florida, where he married and spent the remainder of his life.
