THE GAME MASTER

Most mystics retreat to the mountains to find God. Florence Scovel Shinn found Him at the Ritz.

In 1925, a self-published book with a peculiar title quietly appeared in the bookstores of Greenwich Village. It wasn't a heavy theological tome, and it wasn't a fire-and-brimstone sermon. It was a witty, pragmatic rulebook called The Game of Life and How to Play It.

It changed the face of American spirituality forever.

But who was the woman behind the game?

In this sparkling and rigorous biography, J Wood exhumes the life of the most enigmatic figure of the New Thought movement. Florence Scovel Shinn was not a hermit. She was a Philadelphia blue-blood descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She was a celebrity illustrator during the Gilded Age, famous for her sharp wit and commercial eye. And she was the queen of 1920s Greenwich Village, holding court with Mark Twain and the Ashcan artists.

In The Game Master, you will discover:

• The Crisis: How a devastating divorce from famous painter Everett Shinn shattered her "Perfect Picture" and launched her into the Dark Night of the Soul-and how she used the Law of Non-Resistance to survive it.

• The Transition: How she retrained her artist's eye from drawing on paper to drawing on the "Universal Substance" of the mind.

• The Court: A seat in her Fifth Avenue salon, where debutantes and bankrupt stockbrokers came to learn how to speak their desires into existence.

• The Secret History: Her friendship with Emmet Fox, her refusal to acknowledge the Great Depression, and the real inspiration behind her teaching of the "Square of Life" (Health, Wealth, Love, and Perfect Self-Expression).

Florence Scovel Shinn taught that life is not a battle, but a game. She took the terror out of religion and replaced it with a deck of cards. She taught us that we are the dealer, the player, and the jackpot-and that the only thing standing between us and our "Divine Design" is a careless word.

If you have ever read her books and wondered how a woman in the 1920s knew the secrets of the universe, the answer is here.

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