God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time

In God, The Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time, religion scholar Stephen Prothero tells the story of Eugene Exman, the Harper & Row publisher who played an undeniable role in shaping American religion.

Ahead of his time, Exman led America on a spiritual exploration through the books he published, which included bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own, traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962.  

Exman’s story is one of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Prothero writes about how Exman helped reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion.