Albert Ellis was born September 27, 1913 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in New York. He was the eldest of the three Ellis children and acted as their primary caregiver due to their parents' lack of interest in such things. Their father was somewhat non-existent and although their mother was present in their lives, she was much the same. Ellis described his mother as a self-centered woman with bipolar effect (Ellis, Abrams, & Abrams, 2012, para. 1). He was a sick child and developed serious kidney disease which led to multiple hospitalizations. These hospitalizations “diverted his attention from sports to books” (Ellis Institute, 2014, para. 2) and he found pleasure in writing. Even with all of Ellis' health problems, his parents were still very indifferent towards their children and he continued to care for his siblings until he left to study at the City University of New York. Ellis had wanted to become a novelist, but the Great Depression changed his plans. He earned a degree in business administration from the university in 1934. After graduating, Ellis attempted to become an entrepreneur and started a matching pants business with his brother where they found pants to match the customer's coat . He only had a few more years in the business world before trying his hand at being a fiction writer. He wrote many works of fiction, but at the age of 28, with no published manuscript, he decided his talents lay elsewhere. Ellis (1977) chose to turn to nonfiction about sex, love, and marriage, which he said “interested me and I thought would sell” (para. 25). He researched, read, and became somewhat of an expert on the topics that his friends and family began to seek his advice on...... middle of article...... and impact on using self-help as a form of therapy. This allows the patient to achieve better psychological health with less time spent in therapy sessions. It provides the patient with various worksheets as homework, which helps them achieve greater and more lasting gains in treatment. Ellis was “one of the very first psychotherapists to use such assignments within the framework of a general psychotherapy practice” (Yankura and Dryden, 1994, p. 133). He also wrote a large number of self-help books during his early days as a sex and marriage counselor and throughout his career in psychotherapy until his death in 2007. Yankura and Dryden (1994) state that he “wrote a greater number of self-help books.” of self-help books than any other major psychotherapy theorist” (p. 134). The books made self-help an increasingly popular type of therapy and placed Albert Ellis at the forefront of the field..