James Allen was a British philosophical writer and a pioneer of the self-help movement. He was born to a working-class family in Leicester, England and worked as a private secretary and stationer in several manufacturing firms before he turned to a life of writing. He initially worked as a journalist, before finding his true calling as a spiritual and social writer for the Herald of the Golden Age magazine. In 1902, he began publishing his own spiritual magazine, The Epoch. Allen was a fruitful writer; he wrote motivational books about self-growth, penning a total of nineteen works in his lifetime.
