The last thing Evelyn Wood, the matriarch of speed-reading, expected in 1961 was for somebody to call her a fraud.

Her method, which she called “Reading Dynamics,” could purportedly help anybody read thousands of words per minute. It had captured the nation’s imagination since 1958, when Wood launched the first of her speed-reading institutes in Washington, DC.

The media gushed, with Time magazine even nicknaming her followers in 1960 “Woodmen.”

“A Woodman,” Time wrote, “can mop up ‘Dr. Zhivago’ in an hour.”

Wood had grown accustomed to unquestioning praise. But in December 1961, during a demonstration with two of her prize students at a reading conference in Fort Worth, Texas, she was ambushed by George Spache, a professor at the University of Florida and director of the university’s reading clinic.

In front of an audience of 200, Spache demanded proof.

“He pointed to an adjoining room where a device used to test eye movements was set up,” Marcia Biederman writes in her new biography, “Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked” (Chicago Review Press), out now.

“Spache clearly intended to photograph her demonstrators’ eye movements as they read and test them on comprehension.”

Wood declined and according to a letter written by a graduate student in attendance, Spache responded with “snide remarks” and “suggested quite openly that she was obviously afraid to let them test the boys.”

This isn’t the story that’s usually told of Evelyn Wood, once dubbed “the most famous reading teacher in the world” during the ’60s and ’70s. Her speed-reading revolution is remembered for converting three presidents — Kennedy, Nixon and Carter — and wowing everyone from Steve Allen to Burt Lancaster to Johnny Carson.

By 1961, Reading Dynamics classes — priced at around $150 for 30 class hours — were offered in 56 cities and brought in annual revenues of over $2.5 million. A Texas newspaper warned at the time, “If you can’t read and understand 3,000 to 4,000 words a minute, you’re definitely ‘out’ of the New Frontier.”

But was the “New Frontier” everything it promised? Wood refused all scientific scrutiny, believing that the testimonials of her satisfied customers counted as “subjective evidence.”

Biederman suggests that the way Wood peddled speed-reading was “eerily similar to themes in the Broadway show ‘The Music Man,’ ” where a traveling con man convinced parents that “their children can learn to play an instrument by ‘thinking’ the notes.”

According to Biederman, Wood was making the same smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch.

Born and raised in Logan, Utah, Wood at first seemed destined for a modest life as the wife of a Mormon missionary. But in 1947, as a graduate student in speech therapy at the University of Utah, she stumbled upon “her life’s work,” writes Biederman.

After submitting an 80-page term paper to her professor, Wood watched in amazement as he read it all in under 10 minutes. “He knew the total content and was able to tell me not only what was in it, but also what was missing,” Wood once recalled.

Wood became determined to unlock his secrets and put out a call for “preternaturally fast readers.” She spent the next few years working with a group that ranged from teenagers to housewives to a sheep herder and used her research to develop Reading Dynamics.

Speed-reading was by no means new at the time. Classes had been around since the 1930s, and by the ’50s devices like the Rate-O-Meter and Mahal Pacer were being marketed as speed-reading aids.

But Wood’s methods didn’t require fancy gear. All you needed was your finger, retrained to sweep down the middle of a page rather than left to right. This activated what Wood called “peripheral vision,” where you take in chunks of text rather than individual words.

“So many people are dubious about trying my method because they think they’re liable to miss a lot,” Wood once said in an interview. “I say, which would you rather do: eat a dish of rice kernel by kernel or take a spoonful to get a good taste?”

The spoonfuls were more like gulps. One satisfied customer claimed in a Reading Dynamics ad that he could now read Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1,225 pages, in just 18 minutes.

That’s 68 pages, or 32,627 words, every minute.

The key to Reading Dynamics’ success wasn’t just its (supposed) effectiveness. Wood knew how to put on a show.

During the ’40s, she wrote and directed several elaborate pageants in Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle, including one with special effects and a cast of thousands.

When she started taking her ideas on tour in 1959, with live demonstrations of her speed-reading method in action, Wood served as emcee for a cast of eager adolescents.

“Her decision was in perfect sync with the times,” writes Biederman. “It was the era of the teenager and the teenage consumer.”

Regulars at her demonstrations included 17-year-old Bob Darling from Wilmington, NC, who was “bright, personable, and 6-foot-3 . . . her perfect leading man,” and 14-year-old Bonnie Babbel, who could purportedly read an astonishing 60,000 words a minute.

While they did demonstrate an uncanny reading speed before crowds, their résumés had a funny way of changing. Darling was originally credited with reading hundreds of books a year, but the number jumped to 7,000 after a few months and then down to 5,000 for a paper presented by Wood to the College Reading Association.

Whoever claims to be a speed-reader is likely skimming. - Elizabeth Schotter, who debunked Wood's theories

Even Wood’s own backstory was riddled with fiction. She was frequently billed as a former schoolteacher at Jordan High School in Sandy, Utah, where she first tested her speed-reading theories on students between 1948 and 1957.

“The idea of Evelyn as a veteran teacher was a cultivated misconception,” writes Biederman. She had no academic credentials and during Wood’s nine-year career at Jordan High, she was included as “non-faculty” personnel in the school yearbook, usually as a counselor.

It wasn’t even clear if she was able to emulate her own speed-reading methods. She declined to share her exact word-per-minute record, and her daughter once claimed in an interview that her mother “never would quote a specific speed for herself because it would vary, depending on what she reads.”

There was also the matter of Wood’s supposed relationship with President John F. Kennedy. The story that was told, time and again, that Kennedy personally requested that Wood come to the White House to teach speed-reading to him and his staff.

While several Democratic congressmen did take classes with Wood, including senators from Wisconsin and Georgia, they likely did so to emulate JFK, who could reportedly read 1,200 words per minute.

It wasn’t until after Kennedy’s death that Wood began spreading the story that she’d been personally invited by the late president and had coached both him and his Joint Chiefs of Staff. But no evidence exists of Kennedy endorsing or even mentioning Wood or Reading Dynamics.

“Kennedy was a staunch believer in speed-reading,” Biederman tells The Post. “But Wood wasn’t his teacher, and he didn’t study her method.”

On TV and in the media, Wood’s methods were often portrayed as beyond reproach. The only serious pushback came from academia.

Spache, who ambushed her demonstrations, published his counterargument in 1962, where he claimed to have tested several Reading Dynamics graduates and found that their comprehension levels rarely rose above 50 percent.

Even more damning evidence came from Columbia University professor Eugene Ehrlich, who published his takedown of Wood in The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, titled “Speed Reading Is the Bunk.”

Ehrlich tested four people — three Wood grads and one planning to enroll — and gave them nonsense to read. The text was mostly gibberish with sloppy or nonexistent punctuation.

“None of the Wood-trained readers noted anything amiss,” Biederman writes. “But their untutored colleague protested, ‘Whoever typed this must have been nuts.’ ”

The public either didn’t care or wasn’t paying attention. By the mid-1970s, Reading Dynamics was generating $10.5 million in revenues. The New York Times claimed that Wood’s brand of speed-reading was “no longer a fad but a solid fixture of American education.”

Though Wood and her husband retired from the business in 1967, she continued to be a consultant and make occasional public appearances. Framed photos of her still hung in every Reading Dynamics classroom. In her absence, she took on an almost mythical status, the Betty Crocker of speed-reading.

The institute continued to thrive until Wood’s death in 1995, at the age of 86. Although Reading Dynamics classes are still available today — $499 for a year of online courses and live seminars — the new owners, Kansas City-based Pryor Resources, barely mention Wood.

Time hasn’t been kind to her ideas. Elizabeth Schotter, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, co-authored a 2016 study examining the evidence for speed-reading.

“There’s no way to dramatically increase reading speed without a decrease in comprehension,” Schotter told The Post. “Whoever claims to be a speed-reader is likely skimming.”

As for Wood in particular, Schotter finds her methods “crazy based on the scientific evidence about reading.”

Biederman believes Wood’s success was a product of its time.

“[Reading Dynamics] debuted in a world of typewriters, carbon paper and hand-drawn graphs,” she says. There was more information being circulated and more panic about being left behind, especially in a Cold War environment.

“Americans celebrated as astronaut John Glenn orbited the Earth,” Biederman writes. “But the USSR’s Yuri Gagarin had done it first.” What else would Americans miss by not being ahead of the curve?

That anxiety has apparently resurfaced in recent years. Speed-reading apps like Spreeder and Spritz are offering the same impossible promises that Wood did in the ’60s and ’70s. “Read three times faster,” one app declares “and be more productive in life!”

Biederman isn’t surprised. She points to a 1967 Evelyn Wood ad that asked, “Has the new man already tried out your desk?”

“Eliminate the gender reference,” she says, “and that fear is as relevant as ever.”