The Gulag Archipelago helped bring the horrors of the Soviet labor camp system to a wide readership for the first time.

After criticizing Stalin in private correspondence, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labor camp in 1945-an experience he recounted in a massive three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation-and spent decades living in exile in the West, only returning to Russia in 1994. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, was a notable influence on Peterson. Peterson has long been fascinated by the defining tragedies of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags, and the Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Peterson has been married to his wife Tammy since 1989 and has two adult children, Mikhaila and Julian. He took time away from his clinical practice and teaching to finish writing 12 Rules for Life in 2018, and in 2021, he resigned from the University of Toronto in order to focus on writing and podcasting. While critiquing aspects of political correctness in general, he specifically argued that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns “compelled speech.” The protestor’s video went viral, and after that, Peterson became something of an online celebrity: though he’d been uploading lectures to YouTube since 2013, his follower count climbed into the millions between 20. In October 2016, a protestor filmed Peterson dialoguing with students about a bill passed by the Canadian Parliament which added “gender identity and expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code. He taught at Harvard University from 1993–1998 and joined the psychology faculty at the University of Toronto in 1998.

His career has varied widely: he’s held blue-collar jobs ranging from dishwasher to railway line worker, and as a clinical psychologist, he’s helped clients manage conditions like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. in clinical psychology from McGill University.

He studied political science and psychology at the University of Alberta and earned his Ph.D. Jordan Peterson grew up in rural northern Alberta.

Peterson 12 rules