Robert Collier

Born in St. Louis in 1885, Robert Collier was the nephew of magazine publisher Peter Fenelon Collier and spent his career in New York mastering the craft of direct-mail book marketing before his death in 1950. After selling millions of volumes of historical sets, O. Henry stories and detective fiction by mail, Collier turned to writing New Thought manuals of his own, most notably the seven-volume pocket set The Secret of the Ages (1926), alongside his landmark copywriting manual The Robert Collier Letter Book (1937).

In The Secret of the Ages, Collier synthesized ideas from Prentice Mulford, Charles F. Haanel, Émile Coué and William James into brisk, story-driven chapters aimed at ambitious clerks, merchants and homemakers. He urged readers to form a clear mental picture of a desired goal, hold that image with steady conviction before the subconscious mind, and pair inner visualization with persistent, practical effort. Eight decades later, quotes from The Secret of the Ages were prominently featured in Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 film and book The Secret.

Placing Collier in the mail-order publishing tradition clarifies both his skill and his limits. As his Letter Book openly explains, his professional craft was entering the conversation already taking place in a reader’s mind and moving them to act through vivid imagery and emotional appeal. When The Secret of the Ages speaks of a genie-like subconscious mind that summons material wealth or influences distant events, that is persuasive commercial rhetoric dressed in New Thought metaphysics, not behavioural science.

Read alongside his copywriting principles, Collier’s enduring insight is about how concrete images motivate human action far more effectively than vague wishes. Defining a goal in specific, practical terms so you recognize the next step when it appears is a sound habit of planning, without pretending that mental pictures alone summon fortune.