Before writing When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi was in residency in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. In May 2013, he was diagnosed with stage-4 non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer.[3]
As Kalanithi underwent cancer treatment, he shared his reflections on illness and medicine, authoring essays in The New York Times,[4] The Paris Review,[5] and Stanford Medicine,[6] and participating in interviews for media outlets and public forums.[7] He also began work on an autobiographical book of his experiences as a doctor and a patient facing a terminal illness.[3]
Kalanithi died in March 2015 at the age of 37. His memoir was published posthumously 10 months later.[8] The book includes a foreword by Abraham Verghese and an epilogue by Kalanithi's widow, Lucy Goddard Kalanithi.
Paul Kalanithi
The author of the book, Paul Kalanithi, was born in Bronxville, New York, on April 1, 1977.[3] At the age of 10, his family moved to Kingman, Arizona, where he spent most of his youth. At the early age of 10, his mother gave him books to read in order to educate his young mind. Kalanithi attended Stanford University where he earned a Bachelor and Master of Arts in English literature and a Bachelor of Science in human biology.[2] He attended Cambridge for history and philosophy of science and medicine where he obtained his Masters. After Cambridge, Kalanithi attended Yale for medical school where he met his future wife, Lucy Goddard. After graduating from Yale, they got married and began their residencies in California. Kalanithi started his residency back at Stanford while his wife attended the University of California, San Francisco.[2] Paul and Lucy have a daughter together.[2]
