The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science
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First edition
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| Author | Willa Cather (1873–1947) and Georgine Milmine |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Genre | Biography, history |
| Publisher |
Doubleday, Page & Company (1909) Baker Book House (1971) Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press (1993) |
| Pages | 566 (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 150493 |
| Website | Internet Archive |
The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science was published in November 1909 in New York by Doubleday, Page & Company. Mostly ghostwritten by the novelist Willa Cather, the book is a highly critical account of the life of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the founder of Christian Science, and the early history of the Christian Science church in 19th-century New England.
The first major examination of Eddy's life and work, published when she was 85 years old, the material first appeared in McClure's magazine, in 14 installments, between January 1907 and June 1908. The articles were preceded in December 1906 by a six-page editorial announcing the series as "probably as near absolute accuracy as history ever gets". The eyewitness accounts and affidavits became key primary sources for practically all independent accounts of the church's early history.
The magazine's publisher and editor-in-chief, S. S. McClure, assigned five writers to work on the articles: Willa Cather, winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, who had joined McClure's as an editor in 1906; Georgine Milmine, a freelance reporter who originally brought some of the research to McClure's; Will Irwin, McClure's managing editor; Burton J. Hendrick and Mark Sullivan, both staff writers; and, briefly, the journalist Ida Tarbell. The original byline on the book and articles was Milmine's, but it later emerged that Cather was the principal author.
The New York Times wrote at the time that the book's evidence against "Eddyism" was "unanswerable and conclusive". Christian Scientists reacted strongly to it; there were reports of Scientists buying all available copies and stealing it from libraries. The Christian Science church purchased the manuscript, and soon the book was out of print. It was republished by Baker Book House in 1971 after its copyright had expired, and again in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press, this time naming both Cather and Milmine as authors. David Stouck, in his introduction to the University of Nebraska Press edition, wrote that Cather's portrayal of Eddy "contains some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write".
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