Ernest Becker

American cultural anthropologist — author of The Denial of Death (1974) — which won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously two months after Becker died of cancer — who argued that all human culture is a death-denial mechanism.

Creates Terror Management Theory before it was named — The Denial of Death's argument (that awareness of mortality is the central motor of all human cultural production — religion, heroism, art, narcissism — and that all 'immortality projects' are denial mechanisms for the terrifying fact of death) is the most ambitious single-thesis account of human culture.