Readers of Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA In 1946, Simon & Schuster published Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s bestselling book Peace of Mind, a selfhelp manual that explained how psychiatry and religion together could help individuals achieve emotional and spiritual maturity, and ultimately happiness. At the time of its publication, Liebman was a rabbi at Boston’s Temple Israel and was well known from his sermons on the NBC radio program Message to Israel, broadcast in Boston and New York City. Significantly, Liebman was, in the words of Matthew S. Hedstrom, the first “non-Christian author to reach a mass audience in the United States” and Donald Meyer has called Peace of Mind “the book first heralding the whole flood of postwar religious bestsellers.”1 The book reached readers on six continents, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 173 weeks and the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 147 weeks, and, by 1964, went into its thirty-eighth printing. The significance of Peace of Mind lay in the way Liebman blended religion, psychology, and self-help and the degree to which his readers accepted him as an expert in all three areas. Prior to World War II, selfhelp books were gaining momentum, largely owing to the popularity of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937). Religious authors such as Harry Readers of Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind