Author Bios

Arnold Bennett

James Allen

Julia Seton, MD

Ralph Waldo Trine

Wallace Wattles

Theron Q. Dumont

Christian D. Larson

William Walker Atkinson

William Walker Atkinson ( 1862-1932) was an attorney, merchant, publisher, and author, as well as an occultist and an American pioneer of the New Thought movement. He is also known to have been the author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka.

Due in part to Atkinson's intense personal secrecy and extensive use of pseudonyms, he is now largely forgotten, despite having obtained mention in past editions of Who's Who in America, Religious Leaders of America, and several similar publications - and having written more than 100 books in the last 30 years of his life. His works have remained in print more or less continuously since 1900.

Throughout his subsequent career, Atkinson wrote and published under his own name and many pseudonyms. It is not known whether he ever acknowledged authorship of these pseudonymous works, but all of the supposedly independent authors whose writings are now credited to Atkinson were linked to one another by virtue of the fact that their works were released by a series of publishing houses with shared addresses and they also wrote for a series of magazines with a shared roster of authors. Atkinson was the editor of all of those magazines and his pseudonymous authors acted first as "contributors" to the periodicals, and were then spun off into their own book-writing careers -- with most of their books being released by Atkinson's own publishing houses.

One key to unravelling this tangled web of pseudonyms is found in "Advanced Thought" magazine, billed as "A Journal of The New Thought, Practical Psychology, Yogi Philosophy, Constructive Occultism, Metaphysical Healing, Etc."

This magazine, edited by Atkinson, advertised articles by Atkinson, Yogi Ramacharaka, and Theron Q. Dumont - the latter two being pseudonyms of Atkinson - and it had the same address as The Yogi Publishing Society, which published the works attributed to Yogi Ramacharaka.
Advanced Thought magazine also carried articles by Swami Bhakta Vishita, but when it came time for Vishita's writings to be collected in book form, they were not published by the Yogi Publishing Society. Instead they were published by The Advanced Thought Publishing Co., the same house that brought out the Theron Q. Dumont books - and published Advanced Thought magazine.