George A. Kelly graduated in engineering with psychology as a subsidiary subject at the time when the boom of the ‘twenties in the United States was collapsing into the depression of the early ‘thirties. He found it impossible to obtain employment as an engineer and went to practise psychology in an impoverished, inaccessible area on the border of the dust-bowl. There he had to do the best he could to diagnose and treat the peculiar psychological problems of his patients by himself without the advice or assistance of any medically qualified psychiatrist or other psychologist within reach for consultation. He found little help in the popular psychologies of the period, behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Through trying many experimental approaches he gradually developed a homespun psychology which he expounded in a two-volume book, The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955) and elaborated in a very large number of other publications after he entered the academic world.