Fowler, Orson

Biographical Information

Orson Fowler was born on October 11, 1809, in upstate New York. Along with Henry Ward Beecher, his classmate at Amherst College, Massachusetts, Orson Fowler went to Boston in 1832 to hear the lectures of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. As a result, he abandoned his plans to become a minister and became a convert to phrenology. After graduating in 1834, Fowler began a career as an itinerant lecturer and phrenological demonstrator throughout New England, eventually traveling as far as Mississippi, Upper Canada, and later on California, Nova Scotia, and London, England.

In 1838, Fowler founded the American Phrenological Journal in Philadelphia, and in 1842 moved it to New York City, at which time he resigned as its editor and became its publisher along with his younger brother, Lorenzo. They turned it into the most widely read phrenological periodical in America. Fowler & Fowler (1836) preached a philosophy of personal improvement under the motto “self made or never...