Gurdjieff Books and Music

John Pentland, member of the British House of Lords, was the first president of the newly established Gurdjieff Foundation in New York City. He influenced countless people and established major Foundation outposts throughout the United States but never spoke much about his personal life — his parents, their families, his education, his professional work or personal interests. Following his death in 1984, his daughter, Mary Sinclair Rothenberg, collected a trove of letters, pictures, and newspaper clippings that he had saved.  Along with archived news articles over the decades of his early life, these personal documents are the source materials for this account of his life before 1936 when he began attending meetings in London with P.D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's principal student in the U.K.

Those who did not study with Lord Pentland may know of his work with Gurdjieff's ideas and methods through transcripts of group meetings recorded in the book Exchanges Within, and talks at different public venues rendered in pamphlets published by the J.P. Society and available here. This book serves a different purpose and is an attempt to show the very prominent public life Lord Pentland gave up in order to help bring Gurdjieff's teaching to America.

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