Florence Scovel Shinn

American illustrator, author, and New Thought teacher whose 1925 book The Game of Life and How to Play It became one of the foundational texts of the modern prosperity-and-affirmation tradition — a direct ancestor of every twentieth and twenty-first century 'law of attraction' book from Napoleon Hill to Louise Hay to Esther Hicks. Born 1871 in Camden, New Jersey, into a Quaker family, Shinn trained as an illustrator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked as a commercial artist (illustrating children's books and the popular Anchor Magazine) before turning, in mid-life, to spiritual writing and teaching. Her three principal books — The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925), Your Word Is Your Wand (1928), and The Secret Door to Success (1940) — laid out a practical, biblical-scripture-laced metaphysics in which life is 'a game of giving and receiving' governed by precise spiritual laws (the law of attraction, the law of forgiveness, the law of nonresistance, the law of substitution). She died in New York City in 1940. Her books are now in the public domain and continue to sell millions of copies worldwide.