Wallace Delois Wattles (born Walters; 1860 – 1911) was an American author in the genre of New Thought. While he remains personally somewhat obscure, his writing has been widely quoted and remains in print in the new thought and self-help genres. Wattles’ best known work is a 1910 book called The Science of Getting Rich in which he explained how to become wealthy by the technique of creative visualization.
He studied the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ralph Waldo Emerson and recommended the study of their books to his readers who wished to understand what he characterized as “the monistic theory of the cosmos”.
Wattles claimed to have discovered the truth of New Thought principles and put them into practice in his own life through his personal study and experimentation. He wrote books outlining these principles and practices, giving them titles that described their content. He wrote The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Well; a novel, Hellfire Harrison; The Science of Being Great, a mail-order course expanding on the principles of his three “Science” books; and many, many magazine articles.
Wattles encouraged his readers to test his theories on themselves rather than take his word as an authority, and he claimed to have tested his methods on himself and others before publishing them.
While his work was largely forgotten for years, those who have studied and applied his principles have experienced remarkable results.
‘Rhonda Byrne told a Newsweek interviewer that her inspiration for creating the 2006 hit film The Secret and the subsequent book by the same name, was her exposure to Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich. Byrne’s daughter, Hayley, had given her mother a copy of the Wattles book to help her recover from her breakdown. ‘ (Wikipedia)
