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. Scroll up and click Buy Now to meet the Mystic in the Fur Coat.