Life and career
William Walker Atkinson grew up in Baltimore and married Margaret Foster Black in 1889. He practised law before becoming a prolific writer for the American New Thought movement. His turn to mental training had a personal dimension. Like other converts to the movement, he understood the cultivation of thought as a means of recovering agency over circumstances that had seemed beyond his control.
Chicago gave him access to a public already accustomed to learning by correspondence. He edited periodicals, lectured and published sequences of lessons that could also be sold as books. His professional lives overlapped. In 1903, by which time his lessons on thought and personal influence were in print, he was admitted to the Illinois bar.
Work and ideas
Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life grew out of his teaching. In his preface Atkinson addressed readers who might never attend a lecture, arranging the material so they could practise an exercise and return for the next lesson. The promise that habits of attention could be deliberately trained placed his books at the meeting point of New Thought religion and the emerging literature of personal success.
Atkinson published under several names. Bibliographies also associate him with the yoga courses issued as Yogi Ramacharaka by the Yogi Publication Society. The precise division of authorship behind those lessons is disputed. His signed books offer firmer evidence of his own voice, especially the recurring appeal to the reader as a pupil able to test his teaching in everyday situations.
