This is my personal website, as distinguished from my official university website, which you can now find at http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/elms/pwt/. Here at www.ulmus.net, you’ll find a wide range of content. (Eventually, anyway. Right now it’s still very much in progress, with a lot to add when I get the time.) In the Virtual Library section, you’ll eventually be able to read or download at least two of my previously published books, plus assorted articles and papers that are not readily available elsewhere. The books are long out of print, and the original publishers have turned the copyrights over to me. Portions of these books and papers are of historical interest at best. But I think they also contain ideas and observations that are still worth reading; otherwise I wouldn’t put them here. Also included are parts of a family cookbook that I put together several years ago, with recipes that are still worth cooking, and an assortment of my poems (mostly sonnets) that I hope are still worth savoring.

The Publications in Print section lists, describes, and/or summarizes my more recently published work—material that the publishers won’t let me put into the Virtual Library yet. Here I’m especially interested in promoting my magnum opus, Uncovering Lives, which includes a lot of material related to other parts of this website. (I have received permission to put a sample chapter in this section.) Oxford University Press has continued to make the paperback edition of Uncovering Lives available on a print-on-demand basis, but I'm not sure how long they'll do that. So buy it while you can—or at least ask your local librarians to put it on their shelves.

Pdf files of several of my recent publications can be requested through my university website, http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/elms/pwt/. Just go to that site, click on the "Publications" section, and click again on the "Request" button if there is such a button beside the title of the publication you want. Eventually I'll try to make pdf files available for all my professional papers.

Psychobiography has its own section here because that’s what I do professionally: I study the lives of famous and/or unusually creative individuals, from a psychological perspective. I also sometimes teach psychobiography, and at times I help other people practice it. If you'd like to see more about psychobiography, try an excellent web page recently set up by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Todd Schultz: http://www.psychobiography.com/.

The Personality Theory section is there because I use personality theories a lot in my psychobiographical research, and I taught them for many years to undergraduate and graduate students. I’ve also done a good deal of research on how the major personality theories (by Freud, Jung, Erikson, Maslow, Murray, etc.) evolved out of the lives and personalities of the theorists themselves. I rarely try to develop personality theories of my own, but I do have plenty of opinions about the ones developed by other people.

Likewise for the Science Fiction section of this website: I don’t usually write science fiction (though I’ve tried), but I know quite a bit about it. I’ve been reading it for over fifty years, I’ve done biographical research on a number of science fiction writers, and some of my best friends are science fiction writers. The SF writer who most fascinates me is Cordwainer Smith (real name: Paul M. A. Linebarger). I’m close to completing a book-length biography of him; until then, one subsection of this website section is an Unofficial Cordwainer Smith Biography Home Page. (His daughter, Rosana Hart, maintains an excellent Official Cordwainer Smith Home Page, at http://www.cordwainer-smith.com.) Other science fiction and fantasy writers interest me too, so I’ll include information on them when the Science Fiction section is fully up.

Finally comes the Personal Information section. Right now it consists mostly of the official Curriculum Vitae that all academics are expected to keep complete and up-to-date.  But I’ll try to get more personal here as this website continues to develop . . . as if the rest of the material on the site didn’t already tell you quite enough.

If you want to reach me, the e-mail address I check most often is acelms@ucdavis.edu. I also have an America OnLine address, which I use more often while traveling: alanelms@aol.com . If I don't answer you within a few days, try again -- sometimes I get distracted by other matters and my web correspondence gets left far behind.

Alan Elms