Charles Wagner
1852 to 1918
Charles Wagner was born in 1852 in Wibersviller, Lorraine, grew up in Alsace and became a Protestant pastor in Paris, in the French Reformed tradition. In The Simple Life he remembers leaving home as a schoolboy for the big city, heavy-hearted, and a stone breaker on a lonely road under the Vosges forests who hummed as he worked and told him to take heart. Wagner passed him on that road again and again for thirty years.
The Simple Life appeared in Paris in 1895, quickly became known, and was translated into many languages. Theodore Roosevelt praised it, urged Americans to read it, and in 1904 introduced Wagner himself to an audience in Washington. Among his other books Wagner names Youth, Justice and Courage. He held, as he wrote in his first preface, that every movement toward greater justice and greater light is also a movement toward a simpler life.
