The Books
The Game of Life and How to Play It
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The New York illustrator who became one of the most widely read New Thought teachers of the early twentieth century — whose simple, practical philosophy of word, thought, and faith anticipated much of what came after.
Your word is your wand. The words you speak create your own destiny.Florence Scovel Shinn — The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925
Florence Scovel Shinn was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1871. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked as an illustrator — contributing drawings to popular magazines and children's books — in New York City for many years. She was married to the artist Everett Shinn and moved in New York's artistic circles before turning to New Thought philosophy and spiritual teaching.
She divorced Everett Shinn around 1912 and began teaching New Thought metaphysics, giving lectures in New York and building a following that included many people going through difficulty — financial hardship, relationship crises, illness, loss of direction. She was known for her humor, her practicality, and her ability to explain metaphysical concepts in language that ordinary people could understand and apply immediately.
The Game of Life and How to Play It, published in 1925 when she was fifty-four, was her first and most influential book. It has been continuously in print since its publication and has sold millions of copies. She published three more books — Your Word Is Your Wand, The Secret Door to Success, and The Power of the Spoken Word — before her death in New York in 1940 at sixty-nine.
Shinn's philosophy belongs to the New Thought tradition — the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century movement that held that mental states and spoken words have direct effects on external reality through a divine or universal law of attraction. Her particular contribution is the integration of biblical imagery with practical metaphysical instruction in a voice that is consistently warm, humorous, and accessible.
Her central claim — that the words we habitually speak and the thoughts we habitually think create a pattern in consciousness that attracts corresponding conditions in life — anticipates by decades the popular understanding of what later became known as the law of attraction. But Shinn's version is more nuanced than the popular caricature: she is not simply saying that positive thinking produces positive outcomes. She is arguing that habitual patterns of thought and speech, operating below the level of conscious intention, shape what a person expects, how they behave, and therefore what they encounter.
Her discussion of intuition — the hunch, the flash of insight, the sudden knowing that bypasses reason — as a reliable guide when the reasoning mind is confused connects her to Jung's account of the unconscious, to William James's account of the subliminal self, and to every tradition in this library that has insisted that genuine intelligence is not confined to what the conscious mind can articulate. Her practical exercises — affirmations, visualization, the deliberate choice of what to speak and what to think — were the forerunners of cognitive behavioral techniques that later psychology validated empirically.
Intuition is the spiritual faculty that does not explain, it simply points the way.Florence Scovel Shinn — The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925
Her foundational work — a practical introduction to New Thought metaphysics in the most accessible language the tradition produced. Brief and direct.
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