(Arabic: جوزيف ميرفي) Joseph Murphy was a Divine Science minister and author. Murphy was born in Ireland, the son of a private boy's school headmaster and raised a Roman Catholic. He studied for the priesthood and joined the Jesuits. In his twenties, an experience with healing prayer led him to leave the Jesuits and move to the United States, where he became a pharmacist in New York (having a degree in chemistry by that time). Here he attended the Church of the Healing Christ (part of the Church of Divine Science), where Emmet Fox had become minister in 1931. In the mid 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, and was ordained into Religious Science by Holmes in 1946, thereafter teaching at the Institute of Religious Science. A meeting with Divine Science Association president Erwin Gregg led to him being reordained into Divine Science, and he became the minister of the Los Angeles Divine Science Church in 1949, which he built into one of the largest New Thought congregations in the country. In the next decade, Murphy married, earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Southern California and started writing. After his first wife died in 1976, he remarried to a fellow Divine Science minister who was his longstanding secretary. He died in 1981.

The James Allen Free Library Allen was 15 when his father, a businessman, was robbed and murdered. He left school to work full-time in several British manufacturing firms to help support the family. He later married Lily L. Allen and became an executive secretary for a large company. At age 38, inspired by the writings of Leo Tolstoy, he retired from employment. Allen—along with his wife and their daughter, Nohra—moved to a small cottage in Ilfracombe, Devon, England to pursue a simple life of contemplation. There he wrote for nine years, producing 19 works. He also edited and published a magazine, "The Light of Reason". Allen's books illustrate the use of the power of thought to increase personal capabilities. Although he never achieved great fame or wealth, his works continue to influence people around the world, including the New Thought movement. Allen's most famous book, As a Man Thinketh, was published in 1902. It is now considered a classic self-help book. Its underlying premise is that noble thoughts make a noble person, while lowly thoughts make a miserable person. Following his death in 1912, his wife continued publishing the magazine under the name, "The Epoch".