John Lawson Stoddard (April 24, 1850 – June 5, 1931) was an American lecturer, author and photographer.

[1][2] He was a pioneer in the use of the stereopticon or magic lantern, adding photographs to his popular lectures about his travels around the world.

[3][4] In 1935, Daniel Crane Taylor wrote, "Stoddard's rise to fame was spectacular and unprecedented in the annals of American entertainers.

[2] In 1879, Stoddard turned his travel experiences into a series of popular lectures delivered throughout North America.

[9][2][5] He pioneered the used of the stereopticon, also known as the magic lantern, which gave his lectures the "gimmick" of a visual component—the black and white photographs Stoddard took on his travels.

[10][2] The demand for his lectures was so high that in New York City alone, he would give fifty sold-out presentations each season.

[5] Stoddard began publishing books, including Red-Letter Days Abroad in 1884, Glimpses of the World in 1892, and Portfolio of Photographs which was issued in sixteen weekly installments starting in 1894[9][2] In 1897, he was invited to lecture before the U.S.

In 1910, he selected the content for The Stoddard Library; A Thousand Hours of Entertainment with the World's Great Writers (12 volumes), with an accompanying handbook published in 1915.

[2] During World War I, then ex-pat Stoddard's sympathies lay with the Central Powers, leading to his writing propaganda pamphlets which were published by the German-American Defense Committee in Germany and the United States.

"[12] In 1922 after his conversion to Catholicism, he became a realist in religion, publishing Rebuilding a Lost Faith, by an American Agnostic, a famous work of apologetics.

[55] One literary critic notes, "The Stoddard Lectures serve as a literary backdrop to the performance of Jay Gatsby, who had never read them, who had never cut the pages, but who staged his production elaborately and well, going as far as to buy not only real books but also the right kind of real books.

[2] Raised a protestant, Stoddard was an agnostic for more than thirty years before converting, along with his wife, to Roman Catholicism in 1922.