In 1958, he became a professor at
Montana State University in
Bozeman, and taught creative writing courses for two years. He was friends with
Bob DeWeese and
Gennie DeWeese there. Shortly thereafter he taught at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. This grew into a synopsis for the novel. Pirsig had difficulty finding a publisher at this stage, pitching the idea for his book to 121 different publishers. He sent them a cover letter along with two sample pages; twenty two of which responded favourably.
William Morrow and Company gave Pirsig a US $3000 advance for the project. In July 1968, he went on the road trip, with his son Chris, that greatly informed the book. Pirsig took nearly four years to complete
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writing most of the book while living above a shoe store in south
Minneapolis, while working as a tech writer for
Honeywell. Ultimately, an editor at William Morrow accepted the finished manuscript;
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974. Pirsig's publisher's internal recommendation stated, "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." The book is an exploration of Pirsig's particular concept of
quality, and how it relates to reality. Ostensibly a
first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris had taken from
Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is an exploration of the underlying
metaphysics of
Western culture. He also gives the reader a short summary of the
history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle as part of an ongoing dispute between
universalists, admitting the existence of
universals, and the
Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student
Plato. Pirsig finds in
quality a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views. Pirsig described the development of his ideas and writing his book in a lecture at the
Minneapolis College of Art and Design on May 20, 1974. In his
book review,
George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to
Dostoevsky,
Broch,
Proust, and
Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid ... the analogies with
Moby-Dick are patent". Pirsig was vice-president of the
Minnesota Zen Meditation Center from 1973 to 1975 and also served on the board of directors. In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. This allowed him to work on a follow-up. For this book he developed a value-based
metaphysics,
Metaphysics of Quality, that challenges our subject–object view of reality. In 1991, the book,
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, was published
Bantam Books. This time the narrator is 'the captain' of a sailboat, following on from where
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left off.
Lila was not as commercially successful as his first book, but Pirsig felt it was the more important. He remained frustrated by what he saw as a lack of engagement in the philosophical ideas he put forward, including ideas from
William James Sidis and
James Verne Dusenberry. ==Personal life and demise==