W. D. Wattles

Wallace Delois Wattles (1860–1911) was an American writer of the New Thought movement. Born in Illinois and raised on farms, he had little formal education, lived most of his life in poverty in Indiana. In his last years he found an audience with a series of short, confident books on the power of thought, among them The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Well and The Science of Being Great, published by the Elizabeth Towne Company in 1910 and 1911. The Science of Getting Rich was largely forgotten until Rhonda Byrne credited it as the inspiration for The Secret in 2006.