Until 1896, Lee worked as a minister in New England and Minnesota. After 1896, he was a full-time writer. His first book,
The Shadow Christ, was published that year. According to critic Ryan Jay Friedman, Lee's writing in the 1910s argued that
Christian education was similar to
mass media including
advertising, in that both attempted to persuade people to "choose a particular 'good'". Jo-Anne Pemberton compares Lee's
The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century (1906) with the works of
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and
futurism.
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy (1913) argues that media can be used to develop a more cohesive polity. When
Crowds was released in 1913, Lee wrote in a letter to
Theodore Roosevelt that he hoped that it would be "the text-book of the
Progressive Movement". According to
Russ Castronovo, who calls
Crowds a "crazy sort of book", the book argues for modern mass media as tools for democracy because they prioritize the present and thereby fuel modernization. Lee opposed U.S. entry into
World War I, writing essays and editorials characterizing the war as a clumsy effort of the nations involved to communicate their desires and one that could be settled without any U.S. intervention. This drew a harsh rebuke from
G. K. Chesterton, who criticized Lee for imagining that the war then underway could be ended by mere discussion and for treating the warring forces as if they were on equal moral footing. Lee was "a frequent contributor of reviews to the
Critic and other periodicals and wrote books on religion, modern culture, and physical fitness". He published a magazine called
Mount Tom in
Northampton, Massachusetts. According to
Leonidas Warren Payne Jr., Lee was "a milder, saner sort of twentieth-century
Carlyle, interpreting human nature in new terms for the new age". == Personal life ==