Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.
His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not say where he lived.
Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.
An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold about 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages. It was adapted for a documentary movie narrated by Orson Welles in 1978.
Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions did not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.
“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”
Image“The Late Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. It sold an estimated 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.Credit...ZondervanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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