Wallace-D.-Wattles

Wallace D. Wattles

Pioneer Success Writer

Wallace Delois Wattles (1860-1911) wrote a number of books including Health Through New Thought and Fasting, The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Great, The Science of Being Well, and a novel, Hellfire Harrison, but it is for his prosperity classic, The Science of Getting Rich that he is best known.

Little is known about Wattles' life. He was born in the USA shortly after the civil war, and experienced much failure in his earlier years. Later in his life he took to studying the various religious beliefs and philosophies of the world including those of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Swedenborg, Emerson, and others. It was through his tireless study and experimentation that he discovered the truth of New Thought principles and put them into practice in his own life.

He began to write books outlining these principles. He practised the technique of creative visualisation and as his daughter Florence relates, "He wrote almost constantly. It was then that he formed his mental picture. He saw himself as a successful writer, a personality of power, an advancing man, and he began to work toward the realization of this vision. He lived every page ... His life was truly the powerful life."

Wattles died not long after the 1910 publication of The Science of Getting Rich, but his books, along with those of another well-known prosperity writer of that time, Orison Swett Marden, have had a remarkable effect on people, and much of the success and self-development literature of the past 100 years by the likes of Napolean Hill, Robert Schuller, Anthony Robbins, etc., owes a great debt to these two writers.

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