He came long before Dr. Phil told anyone to get real, and before Tony Robbins convinced business executives they could walk on hot coal.

He beat Rhonda Byrne by about a century to her supposed secret.

James Allen (1864-1912) doesn't get much credit from those self-styled gurus.

But he gets respect from many who say his simple prose on living a moral life holds up today.

"A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts," Allen wrote in his brief "As a Man Thinketh," first published in 1902.

In passage after passage, he said success follows positive thinking. "Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit," he wrote.

That, by the way, is Byrne's message in her wildly popular — and profitable — modern-day book and self-help video, "The Secret."

Byrne doesn't credit Allen. Few do, says Skip Whitson, owner of Sun Publishing, which prints Allen's books in the U.S.

But Allen has a loyal following today.

"I think it says it all," said children's book author Hunter Darden, who keeps a copy of "As a Man Thinketh" by her bedside. She thumbs through it regularly. "I think it's really deep. It's the essence of all one needs to know for a healthy life."

Allen wasn't the first self-help author or guru.

Some give Benjamin Franklin that nod, with his collections of aphorisms and witticisms in his Poor Richard's Almanack.

And in 1859, Scottish author Samuel Smiles published his own appropriately titled "Self-Help."

Before The Big Bucks

Allen wasn't the most successful, either.

Today shelves are filled with diet books, affirmation tapes, seminars and videos. The self-help industry is a $10-billion-a-year juggernaut.

But not in Allen's time.

His 20 or so books found more readers in the U.S. than in his homeland, Britain.

He struggled to pay bills with the income they brought. And he was torn about whether his most famous book, "As a Man Thinketh," was even worth submitting.

His wife convinced him it was.

Allen's work still circulates online and in print.

Whitson says the self-help giants of today owe much to Allen and his generation of thinkers. He calls Allen's time — around 1900 — the golden era for inspirational writing.

In Allen's case, that inspiration seems to have come from ordinary roots.

Allen was born in Leicester, a textile town in central England, in 1864. Little is known about him.

His father, a textile worker, fostered his son's thirst for knowledge, according to a biography compiled by John Woodcock.

His "John Allen & Lily L. Allen: An Illustrated Biography" tells of a young Allen sitting by the family fireplace at night, reading with his father. He would pepper his dad with weighty questions, often answering them himself.

"Such knowledge comes not in one short life," his father would remark.

Those happy times weren't to last.

When Allen was about 15, his father was out of work. The elder Allen set sail for America, hoping to set up a new home and send for his family.

Shortly after arriving, he was apparently robbed and murdered.

Allen left school and began working in the knitting factories of Leicester to help support his mother and younger brothers.

But he wouldn't give up books. Finding his father's copy of Shakespeare's works, he would memorized whole plays.

Many of his co-workers thought him aloof. They called him the Saint and the Parson because he didn't drink or smoke. Woodcock wrote that factory men would stop their coarse joking as he approached.

After a few years, Allen set off on his own.

According to Woodcock's biography, he became a stationer in Wales. He met and married Lily Louisa Oram and moved to Bath to be a secretary.

Later Allen founded a magazine, the Light of Reason, which became the Epoch. He also wrote his first book, "From Poverty to Power."

By 1902, he was ready to devote full time to his philosophical contemplations and books. He and his wife and young daughter moved to a cottage in Ilfracombe, on England's southwest coast.

Over the next nine years, his load of books would follow.

Frequent guests during those Ilfracombe days often described Allen as a frail-looking man who could quote the Bible, Tolstoy and Walt Whitman with ease.

He was also called a quiet and unrewarded genius. He did not become wealthy.

Whitson, at Sun Publishing, says it wasn't about the money for Allen. In his quiet seaside town, he was convinced he had found the good life. Others could find it too.

Allen died there in 1912 at age 47. Obituaries called it a sudden death, without stating a cause.

One local paper, the Ilfracombe Chronicle, noted that he was "a cultured writer, with a facile pen and command of choice language." His books "were marked by very high ethical teaching, and some of them have secured wide circulation, especially in America, where they were better known than in England."

Though his books have nowhere near the circulation of those by today's giants — Dr. Phil, Byrne, Robbins — he still inspires people.

"James Allen's teachings are ageless and timeless," said Emlyn DeGannes, who stumbled across a copy of Allen's "As a Man Thinketh" two decades ago. "Every time I read the book, I will underline something or I'll highlight something."

DeGannes, who owns Mejah Books in Delaware, sells the book. But she gives away more copies. She tucks them into orders placed by men in prison. Or she gives copies to wives, mothers and girlfriends of those who have been sent away.

She wants them to understand why they're in prison, and begin to rebuild their lives.

They often write back, saying the book has helped them. They want her to tell their stories so others don't end up in the same place.

"It helps them with thoughts of why they're there, in a cage, and helps them take some responsibility for it," she said. "You see the redemption process. It happens."

As Allen wrote: "A man does not come to the almshouse or the jail by the tyranny of fate or circumstance, but by the pathway of groveling thoughts and base desires. Nor does a pure-minded man fall suddenly into crime by stress of any mere external force; the criminal thought had long been secretly fostered in the heart, and the hour of opportunity revealed its gathered power."

Do His Words Stick?

Allen also wrote: "Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself."

Steve Salerno calls such lines bumper-sticker banalities. The author of "Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless" is a harsh critic of the movement. He says it oversimplifies complex life issues and fills gullible heads with pap.

Still, he concedes Allen never got his due.

"So many of the things he says are clearly progenitors of a lot of the wisdom that's so popular today," Salerno said. "It's kind of odd that he might have been so overlooked by history."


BY KEVIN HARLIN