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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
33 figures
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Phineas Quimby
1802 – 1866Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.
Warren Felt Evans
1817 – 1889Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.
Frederick Douglass
1818 – 1895His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.
Emily Dickinson
1830 – 18861,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.
Prentice Mulford
1834 – 1891Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.
William James
1842 – 1910Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.
Myrtle Fillmore
1845 – 1931Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.
Emma Curtis Hopkins
1849 – 1925The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.
Charles Fillmore
1854 – 1948Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.
John Dewey
1859 – 1952Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.
Wallace Wattles
1860 – 1911The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.
Nona Brooks
1861 – 1945Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.
William Walker Atkinson
1862 – 1932Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 – 1963The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.
Florence Scovel Shinn
1871 – 1940Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.
Napoleon Hill
1883 – 1970Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.
Ernest Holmes
1887 – 1960Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.
William Faulkner
1897 – 1962Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.
Norman Vincent Peale
1898 – 1993The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.
Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961Stripped English prose to the bone.
Rachel Carson
1907 – 1964Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.
John Rawls
1921 – 2002A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.
James Baldwin
1924 – 1987The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.
Louise Hay
1926 – 2017You Can Heal Your Life and Hay House globalised affirmation culture; its health claims are contested.
Catherine Ponder
b. 1927Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.
Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 – 1968Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.
Toni Morrison
1931 – 2019Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.
Bob Dylan
b. 1941First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.
Martha Nussbaum
b. 1947Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.
David Frawley
b. 1950Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.
Michael Beckwith
b. 1956Founded Agape International and carried New Thought to a global multiracial audience.