H. Byron Earhart

He was born on January 7, 1935, in Aledo, Illinois; son of Kenneth Harry and Mary (née Haack) Earhart.^[2] His father enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 and served on the battleship USS Missouri. His grandparents and mother held a frozen food locker in Havana, Illinois.^[3] H. Byron Earhart married Virginia Margaret Donaho in 1956 and they had three children.^[2]

Earhart attended Knox College in Galesburg, majoring in philosophy and religion. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in a graduate program, got a Fulbright grant and went to Japan for three years of doctoral research.^[3] He studied under Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa at the University of Chicago, where he received a doctorate in History of Religions.^[4]

He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University^[5] from which he received in 1981 a Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award.^[6]

His textbook Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity (1969) is considered a classic, through several editions, and "has remained one of the only treatments of Japanese religious history truly suitable for use in undergraduate classrooms".^[7]

• Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity, 1969,^[1] and later editions,^[8][9][10] also as Religion in Japan: Unity and Diversity^[7]
• The new religions of Japan: a bibliography of Western-language materials. xi, 96 pp. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970.^[11][12] University of Michigan, 1983, pp. 213.^[13][14]
• Religion in the Japanese Experience: Sources and Interpretations. 1974. 1997
• Religions of Japan: Many Traditions Within One Sacred Way , 1984, 1998
• Religious Traditions of the World: A Journey Through Africa, Mesoamerica, North America, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, 1993
• Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2011^[15][16]
• The World War II Homefront in Havana, Illinois: At Grandma's House. Southern Illinois University Press. 2020. ISBN 978-0-8093-7007-8.^[3]