Wallace Delois Wattles (1860-1911) was an American author. A pioneer success writer, he remains personally somehwat obscure, but his writing has been widely popular in the New Thought and self-help movements.
Wattles' best known work is a 1910 book called The Science of Getting Rich in which he explained how to become wealthy. He claimed to have personally "tested" the principles he described and they apparently worked, for although he had lived most of his life in poverty, in his later years he was a prosperous man.
What little is known about Wattles' life comes from the text of a letter his daughter Florence wrote after his death to the New Thought author Elizabeth Towne. (Towne was the editor of the secular New Thought magazine Nautilus and had published many articles by Wattles from the magazine's founding in 1898 until Wattles' death in 1911.) From Florence's letter, one learns that Wattles was born in the United States shortly before the Civil War, experienced much failure in his earlier years, and later in life began to study the various religious beliefs and philosophies of the world, including those of Descartes, Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Swedenborg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.
The most direct influence on Wattles' thinking, outside of the books he read, came in 1896 in Chicago, when he attended "a convention of reformers" and met George Davis Herron, a Congregational Church minister and professor of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College who was then attracting nationwide attention by preaching a form of Christian Socialism. Thereafter Wattles became a social visionary and began to expound upon what Florence called "the wonderful social message of Jesus." He at one time had held a position in the Methodist Church, but, according to Florence, he was ejected for his "heresy".
Wattles was associated with the Chicago-based school of New Thought that centered around the teachings of Emma Curtis Hopkins. Through his personal study and experimentation he claimed to have discovered the truth of New Thought principles and put them into practice in his own life and wrote books outlining these principles.
Wattles practiced the technique of creative visualization and, as his daughter Florence related, "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."
He had been in frail health for several years and was 51 years old when he died in 1911, about a year after publication of The Science of Getting Rich.
Rhonda Byrne told a Newsweek interviwer that her inspiration for creating the 2006 hit film The Secret, and the subsequent book by the same name, was her exposure to The Science of Getting Rich and the works of another New Thought author, William Walker Atkinson.
Quotations
"You don't have to get something for nothing, but can give to every person more than you take from him."
"By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it."
"When you make a failure it is because you have not asked for enough. Keep on, and a larger thing than you were seeking will certainly come to you."
"There is never any hurry on the creative plane, and there is no lack of opportunity."
"The grateful mind is constantly fixed upon the best. Therefore it tends to become the best. It takes the form or character of the best, and will receive the best."
