Before he was a bestselling author, Sam (or Samuel) Harris was perhaps best known as the son of an extremely successful television producer. His mother Susan Harris created popular television shows such as The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, Soap, and Benson. From 1965 to 1969, she was married to Sam's father, an actor named Berkeley Harris (d. 1984). Sam was born in 1967 in Los Angeles and was raised primarily by Susan. Although her background is Jewish (and Berkeley's family was Quaker), Sam grew up in a secular household.

He began his collegiate studies at Stanford University in the mid-1980s, though after his second year, he chose to travel to India to study meditation with Buddhist and Hindu teachers. More than a decade later, he returned to Stanford to complete a degree in philosophy. Between his graduation in 2000 and the completion of his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2009, Harris produced his landmark book and New York Times bestseller The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) as well as a popular follow-up entitled Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). The End of Faith is widely considered the first book of the New Atheist era. Harris has since become a widely recognized public figure and is known for his active promotion of science and secular values.

Harris's other books include The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), and, more recently, a relatively short book coauthored with British Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz entitled Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (2015). In what follows, we shall examine, in sequential order, the two works most relevant to our project, The End of Faith and Islam and the Future of Tolerance. Separated by more than a decade, both books convey Harris's views on, among many other topics, jihad and violent radicalism.