Browse the index

The nun who argued for women's right to learn — and was silenced for it.

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.

Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

1,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.

Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.

Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.

The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.

Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.

The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.

Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.

Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.

Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.

Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.

Canto General and the love poems memorised across a continent.

Taught imagination as the sole creative power; 'assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled'.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.

Interior, philosophical fiction now a global cult.

A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed rewrote literacy teaching for the global south.

The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.

You Can Heal Your Life and Hay House globalised affirmation culture; its health claims are contested.

Made the impossible ordinary and gave Latin America its own way of telling time.

Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.

Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.

Omeros transplanted Homer to the Caribbean.

Theorised 'nation language' and Caribbean creolisation.

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

Made the short story carry the weight of novels.

A House for Mr Biswas and a contested postcolonial vision.

Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.

The Handmaid's Tale became the global shorthand for reproductive coercion.

Open Veins of Latin America reframed a hemisphere's economic history.

First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.

Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.

Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.

Founded Agape International and carried New Thought to a global multiracial audience.

Indigenous rights advocate whose testimonio reached the world.