Wallace Delois Wattles was an American author and a pioneer in the New Thought movement. He is best known for his self-help books The Science of Getting Rich (1910) and The Science of Being Great (1911). Wattles wrote extensively on personal success, prosperity, and spirituality topics.
According to his daughter's letter published in the Nautilus magazine, Wallace Wattles was born in the US in 1860 and received little formal education, eventually finding himself excluded from the world of commerce and wealth.
Wallace D. Wattles lived on a farm in Illinois, where he worked as a farm laborer and later married Abbie Wattles. Wattles became a social visionary after attending a convention of reformers in Chicago in 1896, where he met George Davis Herron, a Congregational Church minister and professor of Applied Christianity.
After meeting Herron, Wattles became a social visionary and began to expound upon what Florence called "the wonderful, social message of Jesus." According to Florence, he once had held a position in the Methodist Church, but then they banished him for his "heresy."
In addition to running for public office as a Socialist Party candidate, Wattles also studied the writings of Hegel and Emerson and recommended their books to readers who wished to understand what he called "the monistic theory of the cosmos."
Wallace D. Wattles claimed to have discovered the truth of New Thought principles through personal study and experimentation and encouraged readers to test his theories on themselves.
Wallace D. Wattles died at 51, almost immediately after he published two books, The Science of Being Well and The Science of Getting Rich.
