Robert Collier

Robert Collier was born on 19 April 1885 in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother died when he and his brother were still young; his father, a foreign correspondent for Collier's Magazine — founded by his uncle, Peter F. Collier — travelled widely and was largely absent. Educated at a church seminary school and expected to take holy orders, Collier chose a different course. He went instead to West Virginia, where he spent roughly eight years working as a mining engineer. A prolific reader, he found in the company office books on advertising and business correspondence that would eventually redirect him towards a writing career.

After his time in West Virginia, Collier moved to New York and joined the P.F. Collier publishing company in an advertising capacity. He had long held the idea of producing a set of books on practical psychology — the relationship between thought, decision-making, and material outcome. Working intensively on the project, he completed what became The Secret of the Ages, a multi-volume work. Within six months of publication it had generated over one million dollars in orders, and more than 300,000 sets were eventually sold. The work established a framework that later authors, including Rhonda Byrne, acknowledged as foundational.

Collier continued writing through the following decades, remaining based in New York. A husband and father of six children, he died of cancer in 1950. Robert Collier Publications, Inc., established by his widow and subsequently carried forward by his children and grandchildren, has kept his books continuously in print. The Secret of the Ages remains available through major publishers and is a persistent reference point in the self-help genre; its central argument — that deliberate thought shapes material circumstance — runs through much of the popular literature that followed it.