(Excerpt from Introduction
In offering this small volume t...)
Excerpt from Introduction
In offering this small volume to the public my intention is to help those who are seeking the truth, by telling personal experiences of myself, and others, of far greater usefulness in the world, who know God and love him and serve him.
(Fulton Oursler's outstanding classic The Greatest Story E...)
Fulton Oursler's outstanding classic The Greatest Story Ever Told narrates the ever-new, everlasting story of the life of Jesus Christ. Written with powerful simplicity and set against a rich and accurate historical background, this account of the greatest life ever lived describes the moving story of Christ's nativity, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, Christ's youth, His public ministry, passion, death, and resurrection.
While there have been many lives of Christ published, few have received so wide a popular acclamation as Fulton Oursler's classic tale. Since it was first published in 1949, when it was instantly acclaimed by both the secular and lay press and endorsed by clergy of all faiths, The Greatest Story Ever Told has gone into scores of printings, has been read by millions, and is one of the most successful bestsellers of all time. The life of Christ is certainly the greatest story ever told, and Fulton Oursler has told it superbly well.
The Greatest Faith Ever Known: The Story of the Men Who First Spread the Religion of Jesus and of the Momentous Times in Which They Lived
(This sequel to The Greatest Story Ever Told follows the t...)
This sequel to The Greatest Story Ever Told follows the turbulent adventures of the apostles Paul, Peter, and James after the crucifixion of Christ in their struggle to spread the Good News to the world. Faithfully based on the scriptures of the Acts and the Epistles, this saga of kings and jailers, of far voyages and shipwreck, of strange miracles and escapes and ultimate martyrdom, has inspired and touched generations of readers. It is a story that is timeless.
"A magnificent book and the most inspiring reading that has come my way for a long time."
--A.J. Cronin
"A lucid, deeply moving account of the first century of the Christian era. Fulton Oursler has re-created the life of the early Church with noble simplicity and profound understanding."
--Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., Past President of Fordham University
"Multitudes of people will rejoice in this book... the story is told with wonderful and convincing simplicity."
--Chicago Tribune
Charles Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, editor and writer.
Background
Fulton Oursler was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of William Clarence ("Charles") Oursler, superintendent of the Baltimore transit company, and Lillian Sappington Oursler. His mother's life was shadowed by the death of both of his sisters in early childhood, and Oursler's deepest boyhood attachment, he recalled, was to a black woman, "Black Ann, " a retainer of his mother's family in Chestertown who visited the Ourslers weekly in the city. Although in effect an only child, he grew up among cousins, aunts, uncles, a host of neighborhood playmates, and a succession of lodgers. His city upbringing, Oursler later stated, was full of "excitement and wonder and thrills and joy. " Nevertheless, probably just as determinative for his later life was a kind of inner solitude, presumably the result of several converging factors: his status as only child, his mother's pathos, a certain stubborn isolationism in his father, the family's Baptist and Yankee traditions in lower-class Catholic and Confederate Baltimore, and, finally, some innate talents.
Education
As a boy Oursler had obvious high verbal intelligence. He read omnivorously: books left behind by horsecar patrons, books from the public library, and books recommended by adventurous spinster lodgers. When his father lost the job he had held for twenty years, Oursler was forced to quit school at the age of fourteen.
Career
Oursler began clerking for two lawyers who enjoyed Baltimore's cultural life and introduced him to local writers and the theater. By the age of seventeen he was a reporter for the Baltimore American. For extra income Fulton wrote for numerous trade journals and was just able to support his family. In 1918 he moved to New York, where he felt his destiny lay, and promptly became managing editor of a trade journal, Music Trades, after the previous editor went to war. In 1922 Oursler took a job as editor with Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of Physical Culture magazine and longtime exponent of a gospel of health. Discerning in Oursler ideal gifts for editorial showmanship, Macfadden made him his second-in-command, a relationship that lasted for twenty years. The Macfadden organization soon was publishing a string of magazines. Physical Culture, True Story, True Romance, and True Detective were among those for which Oursler had special responsibilities. In 1931 Macfadden bought Liberty Magazine, a money-losing five-cent weekly of the McCormick-Patterson group. Filling it with police and G-man stories, Oursler launched Liberty on a decade-long competition for leadership with Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. He always devoted a great deal of attention to promoting Macfadden's philosophy, personality, and political hopes. Throughout this period Oursler also wrote on his own, producing several popular novels, nonfiction works (including two books on Macfadden), and a series of detective novels under the pseudonym Anthony Abbott.
In 1924, Oursler met a 24-year-old writer, Grace Perkins, whom he married the next year after divorcing his wife in Mexico. Grace Perkins was a Catholic and they were married in Mexico by a Catholic priest. Eventually Oursler's lawyer persuaded his first wife, Rose Karger Oursler, to agree to a divorce. Oursler had anticipated these events in his first novel, Behold This Dreamer! (1924). Grace Perkins Oursler also became a prolific author of popular novels during the 1930's; her works included Modern Lady, Ex-Mistress, and Promiscuous and were essentially devoted to demonstrating the merits of the self-supporting modern American woman. Oursler's fascination with this figure suffused his second novel, The World's Delight (1929), based on the unconventional life of the nineteenth-century actress Ada Isaacs Mencken. The two children of his second marriage also became writers.
During the late 1930's Grace Oursler had become an alcoholic but by 1945 she was restored in her religious faith and was active in Alcoholics Anonymous. She was also editor of a new interfaith magazine, Guideposts, sponsored by Norman Vincent Peale. Oursler himself became a Catholic in 1943, not long after his resignation in 1942 from the Macfadden organization. In explanation of his conversion, he specified a vacation trip in 1935 to the Holy Land, where "suddenly I found my mind stirring with a strange nostalgia. " Bernarr Macfadden's ex-wife, Mary Macfadden, recalled that as early as 1922 Oursler had joined Macfadden in Bible research for physical culture items to print in the magazines. After 1935, still consciously the skeptic he had been since youth, Oursler contemplated writing a life of Jesus "as entertaining as a serial story in a popular magazine. " To further that ambition he took a second trip to the Holy Land and sought Roman Catholic religious instruction. In 1948 he presented as a successful radio serial what, in 1949, became his book The Greatest Story Ever Told. The publication's immediate success prompted sequels, The Greatest Book Ever Written (1951) and The Greatest Faith Ever Known (1953).
During World War II, Oursler, at the request of his friend J. Edgar Hoover, lent his editorial reputation to the operation of a cover for an FBI intelligence operation in Latin America. In 1944 he joined the Reader's Digest as a senior editor with special responsibilities for religion. He also helped to develop the Digest's characteristic postwar preoccupations with nostalgic Americana, law enforcement, domestic subversion, psychological piety, and media personalities. Oursler's career sheds some light on a central problem in narrating the history of American popular culture in the twentieth century, namely, explaining how the wide-based, popular "revolution in manners and morals" of the 1920's, presumably emancipatory and individualistic, was absorbed and socialized into a new defensive tribalism by the late 1940's. At the time of his death Oursler was identified as an exponent of patriotic conservative piety; his thirty years of service to the popular journalism of crime, sex, fads, and public relations were forgotten.
In 1935 Oursler visited the Holy Land. On the journey home, he started writing a book titled A Skeptic in the Holy Land. "I started out being very skeptical, " he wrote later, "but in the last chapter I almost converted. " He assumed that once the book was published, he would forget about religion. However, perceiving the growing threat of Nazism and Communism, he found himself increasingly drawn to Christian ethics. In 1943, Oursler was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Astounded at how little people knew about the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, he decided that he would write the story of Jesus.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Macfadden once said of Oursler, "He's the greatest editor in the country because he always knows what the majority of the people want to read. "
Connections
Fulton Oursler married Rose Keller Karger, the daughter of a cigarstore owner, at the age of eighteen. By the time he was twenty he was the father of two children. In 1924, Oursler met a 24-year-old writer, Grace Perkins, whom he married the next year after divorcing his wife in Mexico.