14 Facts About Wallace Wattles

Wallace Delois Wattles was an American New Thought writer.

Wallace Wattles remains personally somewhat obscure, but his writing has been widely quoted and remains in print in the New Thought and self-help movements.

Florence Wallace Wattles wrote that her father was born in the US in 1860, received little formal education, and found himself excluded from the world of commerce and wealth.

Wallace Wattles's father is listed as a gardener and his mother as "keeping house".

Wallace Wattles is listed as being born in Illinois while his parents are listed as born in New York.

Wallace Wattles died on February 7,1911, in Ruskin, Tennessee, and his body was transported home for burial to Elwood, Indiana.

In 1896 in Chicago, Illinois, Wallace Wattles 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.

Florence Wallace Wattles remained a Socialist after his death, and was a delegate to the Socialist Party National Committee in 1912 and 1915.

Wallace Wattles wrote books outlining these principles and practices, giving them titles that described their content, such as Health Through New Thought and Fasting and The Science of Being Great.

Wallace Wattles saw himself as a successful writer, a personality of power, an advancing man, and he began to work toward the realization of this vision.

Wallace Wattles held pseudoscientific ideas about diet and was an advocate of fasting.

Wallace Wattles argued that energy and strength is not drawn from food but from a "mysterious power", a life force that is received into the body during sleep via the brain by God.

Wallace Wattles believed that fasting opened the door to the possibility of spiritual immortality.

Wallace Wattles advocated the then-popular theories of "The Great Masticator" Horace Fletcher as well as the "No-Breakfast Plan" of Edward Hooker Dewey, which he claimed to have applied to his own life.