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 November 25, the New York Times reported. He was 95.
The Late Great Planet Earth, co-authored with C.C. Carlson though "some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her," was released in 1970 by Zondervan, the Times noted, adding that a Bantam Books editor thought this first book "had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights."
The book went on to be the bestselling nonfiction title of the 1970s, with estimated sales of about 35 million copies by 1999. It was translated into some 50 languages and adapted for a documentary film narrated by Orson Welles in 1978.
Although Lindsey's doomsday predictions did not come true, he was a harbinger of a movement he helped create. The late historian Paul S. Boyer once wrote: "Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief.... [He] "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."
Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies at George Washington University who followed Lindsey's career, said in a 2015 interview for the Times obituary that she found his tone "weirdly gleeful" considering its central notion, "that there are going to be rivers of blood everywhere."
Lindsey wrote other books dealing with Satan and the impending end of the world. They were successful, though not as much as The Late Great Planet Earth.
"What Hal Lindsey forged with his foray into modernized prophecy talk," McAlister wrote in 2001, "was a new kind of evangelicalism in which cultural conservatism, political worldliness and spiritualist enthusiasm would not only coexist but would revitalize and reinforce each other. In that sense, his vision was prophetic indeed."