Biography
Neville Goddard was born on 19 February 1905 in St. Michael, Barbados in the British West Indies, to Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, a merchant, and Wilhelmina Nee Hinkinson. Neville was the fourth child in a family of nine boys and one girl.
In 1922 he came to the United States on board the S.S. Vasari to study drama at the age of seventeen. He became a dancer, and during this time he married his first wife, and they had a son together, named Joseph Neville Goddard. While touring with his dance company in England he developed an interest in metaphysics after striking up a conversation with a Scotsman who lent him a series of books on the powers of the mind. Upon his return to New York he gave up the entertainment industry to devote his full attention to the study of spiritual and mystical matters.
Neville Goddard's first marriage was short lived, and he remained single for years until in the 1930s he met his second wife, who was a designer. After they married, they had a daughter named Victoria or "Vicky". In 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army at age 38, which he did not want, especially since he felt he was too old to become a soldier and had a wife and daughter at home to take care of. Through the power of imagination, as Neville told it in his March 24, 1972 lecture, he was honorably discharged after just a few weeks of training. One consequence of his brief Army training was that he received full United States citizenship, having been a British citizen up to this point.
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