Gerald Stanley Lee

author

Gerald Stanley Lee

1862–1944

A minister turned full-time writer, he explored how reading, technology, crowds, and modern life were reshaping everyday people in early 20th-century America. His books mix social criticism with a lively, forward-looking curiosity that still feels surprisingly fresh.

4 Audiobooks

The Lost Art of Reading

The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

The Ghost in the White House Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

The Ghost in the White House Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

Crowds A Moving-Picture of Democracy

Crowds A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

The Voice of the Machines An Introduction to the Twentieth Century

The Voice of the Machines An Introduction to the Twentieth Century

by Gerald Stanley Lee

About the author

Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1862, Gerald Stanley Lee was an American writer and Congregational minister. He studied at Middlebury College and Yale, served churches in New England and the Midwest, and left the pulpit in 1896 to devote himself to writing.

Lee became known for energetic books and essays about modern culture, democracy, religion, reading, and the social effects of new machines and mass life. Among the works most often associated with him are The Lost Art of Reading, Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy, and The Voice of the Machines.

What makes his work interesting now is the way he tried to understand rapid change without sounding purely gloomy or purely celebratory. He wrote as someone watching a new century arrive and asking what technology, publicity, and collective opinion might do to the inner life of ordinary readers and citizens.