Dwight Lyman Moody was born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children raised in modest circumstances by a widowed mother. He received little formal education and moved to Boston as a teenager to work in his uncle's shoe store, where he came under the influence of a Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball. Converted at seventeen, Moody was by his own admission no scholar and no ordained minister—he remained a layman throughout his entire career, a fact that shaped both his appeal and his critics' reservations.
He relocated to Chicago in 1856, where he threw himself into YMCA work and independent Sunday school ministry among the city's poor immigrant neighborhoods. The years surrounding the Civil War deepened his sense of urgency about evangelism, and by the 1870s he had formed a lasting partnership with the musician Ira Sankey. Together they conducted revival campaigns of remarkable scale in Britain between 1873 and 1875, drawing audiences in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London that numbered in the thousands nightly. Returning to America, Moody brought the same methods to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, combining Sankey's gospel songs with Moody's direct, anecdote-driven preaching.
His theology was broadly evangelical and notably irenic for his era. He held to substitutionary atonement and human sinfulness with conviction, yet he worked across denominational lines and resisted the sharper controversies that divided Protestants in his lifetime. He founded schools in Northfield and Chicago—the latter becoming what is now Moody Bible Institute—believing that trained workers and accessible Scripture were as essential as any revival meeting.
Moody died in December 1899, having never held a church office yet having arguably done more than any single American of his generation to define popular Protestant evangelism as a transatlantic enterprise. The institutions bearing his name continued long after him, carrying forward his conviction that the gospel required neither complexity nor credential to be proclaimed.