About the Authors

JAMES ALLEN was born in Leicester, England, in 1864. He took his first job at fifteen to support his family, after his father was murdered while looking for work in America. Allen worked as a private secretary with various manufacturing companies until 1902, when he left to devote himself fully to writing. He soon finished his first book, From Poverty to Power, and then moved to Ilfracombe, England, where he went on to write eighteen more books before his death in 1912. Originally published in 1903, As a Man Thinketh is his second and most widely celebrated work, cited by generations of prosperity authors.

 

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1862. Atkinson became an attorney in 1894, a career move that led to financial success but precipitated a complete mental and physical breakdown. He coped with his breakdown by reading New Thought literature, and became an important and influential figure within the early movement, publishing magazines such as Suggestion, New Thought, and Advanced Thought, as well as contributing to Elizabeth Towne’s The Nautilus. Atkinson was the author of The Secret of Success, as well as many titles written under pseudonyms such as Yogi Ramacharka, The Three Initiates, and Theron Q. Dumont. An honorary president of the International New Thought Alliance, Atkinson died in California in 1932.

 

Best known as the most outrageous and controversial showman of the nineteenth century, P. T. BARNUM was born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810. After failing at an early career as a shopkeeper, Barnum founded the weekly paper The Herald of Freedom in 1829, and began his career as a showman in 1835. He spent the next several decades running Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, where he maintained a collection of famous oddities. He toured with a notorious sideshow that included performers like “General” Tom Thumb and Jumbo the Elephant, and that eventually developed into the first modern three-ring circus. Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut state legislature, beginning in 1865, and was the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for a single year in 1875. Barnum was also a successful author. His autobiography, which came out in a variety of editions and titles, was second only to the New Testament in number of copies printed in the nineteenth century. His most enduring work is The Art of Money Getting. He died in 1891 in Bridgeport.

 

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1885, ROBERT COLLIER trained to become a priest early in his life, before settling on a career in business, achieving success in the fields of advertising, publishing, and engineering. After recovering from a chronic illness with the help of mental healing, Collier began studying New Thought, metaphysical, and success principles. He distilled these principles into a popular and influential pamphlet series, collected into a single volume as The Secret of the Ages in 1926, and later revised by Collier in 1948. He died in 1950. Collier’s original 1926 work is reproduced here.

 

Born in 1843, RUSSELL H. CONWELL was trained as a lawyer, served as a Union soldier, and worked as an international journalist. He was ordained and worked as a Baptist minister before founding Temple University in Philadelphia, in 1888, to meet the educational needs of the younger members of his congregation. Conwell served as Temple University’s first president, and his Conwell School of Theology became the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, one of the largest interdenominational seminaries in the United States. Acres of Diamonds began as an inspirational lecture he delivered more than six thousand times before his death in 1925.

 

THERON Q. DUMONT was a pseudonym used by WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON in the early twentieth century.

 

Born in 1854, on an Indian reservation near St. Cloud, Minnesota, CHARLES FILLMORE spent much of his early life unsuccessfully speculating on real estate and traveling the country seeking a cure for his wife Myrtle’s tuberculosis before co-founding the New Thought-based Unity movement with her. Their magazine, Unity, was first published in 1889, and in 1906, he and Myrtle were among the first to become ordained Unity ministers. The Unity movement eventually oversaw multiple magazines such as Modern Thought, Daily Word, and Wee Wisdom. It also maintained its own printing plant, and ran the town Unity Village in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Fillmore died in 1948.

 

Born in 1886 in Ireland, EMMET FOX was trained as an electrical engineer but instead pursued a life as a spiritual teacher and lecturer in the United States. In 1931, he became the minister of the Church of the Healing Christ in New York City. An acclaimed and influential philosopher, spiritual teacher, and writer whose works, such as The Sermon on the Mount, were an early inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous, he died in France in 1951.

 

Patriot, politician, inventor, philosopher, author, and businessman BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1706. As a young man, Franklin moved to Philadelphia, where he became a printer and newspaper editor, publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin became a hero to colonial America because of his work to repeal the Stamp Act and other unpopular British measures in the colonies, as well as his service as a diplomat during the Revolutionary War. Franklin helped negotiate and then write the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, inventor of technology such as the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, and creator of the first public library and fire department, Franklin remains an inspirational figure to countless Americans. He died in 1790.

 

Born in 1866, CHARLES F. HAANEL achieved success as both a businessman and an author, rising to top positions at numerous corporations in his native St. Louis throughout his life. Often called the “Father of Personal Development,” Haanel was among the earliest writers to popularize the “Law of Attraction.” Haanel originally published The Master Key System as a correspondence course in 1912, before collecting the lessons and publishing them as a single volume in 1917. Haanel retained membership in many influential groups, such as the American Society for Psychical Research, and went on to write Mental Chemistry and The New Psychology. He died in 1949. His 1917 edition of The Master Key System is reproduced here.

 

NAPOLEON HILL was born in 1883, in Virginia, and died in 1970 after a long and successful career as a consultant to business leaders, a lecturer, and an author. Think and Grow Rich is the all-time bestseller in its field, having sold 15 million copies worldwide, and setting the standard for today’s motivational thinking.

 

The founder of the worldwide Religious Science movement, ERNEST HOLMES was born on a small farm in Lincoln, Maine, in 1887. As a young man, he moved to California, where he spent most of his career writing, speaking, starting a seminary, and founding a successful network of metaphysical churches. Largely self-educated, Holmes was a uniquely gifted scholar with a vast command of the world’s spiritual philosophies. His many inspirational books include the classic textbook of his ideas, The Science of Mind, and a wide range of shorter works such as Creative Mind, This Thing Called You, The Art of Life, Creative Mind and Success, and The Hidden Power of the Bible. He died in California in 1960.

 

Journalist ELBERT HUBBARD was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1856. A founder of the Arts and Crafts movement community Roycroft, in East Aurora, New York, Hubbard acted as publisher and editor of two popular magazines, The Philistine and The Fra. Hubbard died aboard the ship Lusitania in 1915, after it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. He was en route to Europe, on a trip to encourage the end of World War I. His famous motivational essay A Message to Garcia was made into a silent film by Thomas Edison in 1916 and a “talkie” by George Marshall in 1936. Copies were provided for all U.S. Marines and U.S. Navy enlistees during both World Wars.

 

Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1871, FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN spent many years working as an artist and illustrator of children’s literature in New York City before writing her New Thought classic The Game of Life and How to Play It. Unable to find a publisher, she published the book herself in 1925. Shinn went on to write Your Word Is Your Wand and The Secret Door to Success, and became widely regarded as an important American spiritual teacher. She died in 1940.

 

F. W. SEARS spent his early life studying medicine, and earned a master’s degree in psychology before going on to pen the Books Without an If series. This series outlined his philosophy of the Law of Harmonious Convergence—that things come to us and stay with us because they want to, not because we desire them to. He lived and worked in the early twentieth century.

 

Born in 1860, ELIZABETH TOWNE founded the highly influential New Thought magazine The Nautilus by herself in 1898, as a single mother casting about for income. With second husband William E. Towne, Elizabeth established a business distributing New Thought literature in their town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. With more than fifty thousand readers at its peak, and featuring contributors such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, William Walker Atkinson, and Orison Swett Marden, The Nautilus was one of the most successful and influential New Thought publications of its time. Towne was the author of thirteen books, including Experiences in Self-Healing. In 1924, she was elected head of the New Thought Alliance. The Nautilus ended its more than half-century print run in 1953.

 

An influential figure in the early New Thought movement, RALPH WALDO TRINE was born in 1866, in Mount Morris, Illinois. The author of more than a dozen books, he started off as a correspondent for the Boston Daily Evening Transcript before writing his widely popular In Tune with the Infinite. Informed by the ideas of thinkers as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Henry Drummond, In Tune with the Infinite went on to sell more than 2 million copies. Trine died in 1958, in Claremont, California.

 

A progressive social reformer and New Thought pioneer, WALLACE D. WATTLES was born in 1860 in the United States. He popularized creative-thought principles in his ground-breaking classics The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Great, and The Science of Being Well. A great influence on future generations of success writers, he died in 1911.

 

Born in 1831, HELEN WILMANS left a life as a farmer’s wife to move to San Francisco and begin a successful career in newspaper journalism. A one-time student of the respected New Thought teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins, Wilmans was a highly influential early practitioner and teacher of mental science, as well as a publisher of the periodicals Freedom and The Woman’s World. She died in 1907.