Harold Sherman

Harold Morrow Sherman (13 July 1898 - 19 August 1987) was an American author who began his career writing sports stories for boys and went on to become one of the best-known popular writers on extrasensory perception and the powers of the mind.

Born in Traverse City, Michigan, he moved to New York to launch his writing career, also producing plays and screenwork, before turning increasingly to self-help and psychic phenomena. In 1937-1938 he conducted a celebrated long-distance telepathy experiment with the Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, each man recording nightly “thought impressions” while thousands of miles apart, an episode that established his reputation in psychic research.

Sherman collaborated and corresponded with serious investigators including Duke University’s J.B. Rhine, who coined the terms “parapsychology” and “ESP,” and later the astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

His popular books - notably How to Make ESP Work for You (1964) and Your Mysterious Powers of ESP (1969) - presented mind-power and psychic ability as latent, trainable human faculties, framing thought as something that could be transmitted, received, and used to influence one’s life.

He thus connected the New Thought conviction of mental causation to the empirical language of mid-century parapsychology.