Famous motion picture actress Mary Pickford wrote her inspirational self-help manual Why Not Try God? in 1934, with the aid of her collaborator Adela Rogers St. Johns. For nearly eighty years, its thoughtful approach toward spirituality has encouraged and inspired her audience. Pickford's positive approach gives anyone, believer or non-believer, a rationale on which to build faith, and a path to understanding the difficulties we face in life.

It contains her most famous quote: "...this thing that we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down", along with her prescription for how to pull yourself back up again for a new beginning. Pickford starts her story with her own youthful rebellion against a God whom she thought unjust, after the death of a childhood friend. She continues with her own turnabout as an adult, including stories of people who have inspired her and the thoughts of scientists and philosophers in whose statements on religion she has found meaning and understanding.

Why Not Try God? is ultimately a cheerful work, a short, effective essay on why we should believe, and how such belief can become a positive influence that will help us meet our daily challenges and affect our lives and the lives of those around us for the better. This new edition, simply and elegantly set, contains a new afterword by film scholar and educator Anke Brouwers. Dr. Brouwers reveals the reasons that caused Mary Pickford to write Why Not Try God? and gives us a context for understanding her work that will be of interest both to fans of the actress and to the general public.