Dr. Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924) was an American inspirational author who wrote about achieving success in life and founded SUCCESS magazine in 1897. His writings discuss common-sense principles and virtues that make for a well-rounded, successful life. Many of his ideas are based on New Thought philosophy.
Dr. Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924) was an American inspirational author who wrote just about achieving finishing in cartoon and founded SUCCESS magazine in 1897. His writings discuss common-sense principles and virtues that make for a well-rounded, successful life. Many of his ideas are based on New Thought philosophy.
His first book, Pushing to the Front (1894), became an instant best-seller. Marden sophisticated published fifty or more books and booklets, averaging two titles per year.
Marden was born 11 June 1848 in Thornton Gore, New Hampshire, to Lewis and Martha Marden. When he was three years old, his mommy died at the age of 22, leaving Orison and his two sisters in the care of their father, who was a farmer, hunter, and trapper. When Orison was seven years old, his dad died from injuries incurred while in the woods. Consequently, the children were shuttled from one guardian to another, with Orison committed for five successive families as a “hired boy” to earn his keep.
During his beforehand to mid-teens, Marden discovered a sticker album entitled Self-Help by Scottish author Samuel Smiles in an attic. The autograph album marked a turning lessening in his life, inspiring him to put in himself and his circumstances. Marden valued the scrap book as if it were “worth its weight in diamonds” and virtually vigorous its contents to memory. He developed a deep adulation and love for the author, whose affect instilled in him a desire to inspire others as Samuel Smiles had ended for him.
Marden’s young person manhood was marked by remarkable dynamism and unbroken achievement. By his in advance thirties, he had earned his academic degrees in science, arts, medicine and law. During his literary years he supported himself by effective in a hotel and once by becoming the owner of several hotels and a resort. He remained a affluent hotel owner till his beforehand forties (see “Timeline” for dates and extra details).
At age 44, Marden switched careers to professional authorship. It was a bold decision to which he had given careful thought, having suffered repeated event reversals and a hotel fire. His Eager sense of idealism along like an urgent desirability of “now or never” in center life spurred him onward in his extra goal.
Margaret Connolly, a contemporary who worked for Marden’s publishing final in the to come 1900s, describes the incident of the hotel fire, his narrow flee from death, and the loss of his original manuscript, which he forward-looking re-wrote and entitled Pushing to the Front. Marden’s obstinate determination to start from graze after this devastating loss was characteristic of the man and his writings. Connolly writes:
Overwhelmed and heartbroken, Marden picked himself happening and started anything over again. With little money, but when much time on his hands, he decided to rewrite the manuscript. He took a train for Boston, boarded an inexpensive Tiny room, and threw himself excitedly into his work. In a rapid time, he over and over and done with with writing not abandoned his hope book – Pushing to the Front – but along with a second book, Architects of Fate. He after that made three manuscripts of Pushing to the Front and submitted them to three Boston publishing firms for approval. All three firms wanted to read out the book on a first reading of the manuscript. Ultimately, it was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company (Boston) and presented to the public on December 1, 1894.
Pushing to the Front (1894) became the single greatest absconder classic in the archives of personal go ahead books at that time. American presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, as without difficulty as England’s Prime Minister William Gladstone, praised the book. People later than Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and J. P. Morgan cited it as inspiration. In summing up the scope and impact of Marden’s first literary effort, Connolly states that “wo hundred and fifty editions of Pushing to the Front have so far [in 1925] been published in this country alone. It is known and entrйe in practically all country in the world.” Marden went on to write 50 or more books and booklets during his career. Each of his books has produced dozens of well-known quotes, and he is considered the base and inspiration of dozens of liberal authors of self-help and motivation.
Founded in 1897, Marden’s Success magazine eventually grew to a circulation of not quite half a million subscribers. The declaration had its own building and printing tree-plant in New York and was backed by a workforce of two hundred or more employees. For his magazine, Marden wrote articles that focused on self-culture, personal press forward and principles of success. Other articles featured personal interviews of booming men and women. Notable public figures included the late president Teddy Roosevelt, the poet Julia Ward Howe, inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and leading industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Over fifty of these interviews were progressive compiled into scrap book form. The magazine is yet published today by Dallas-based SUCCESS Partners.
Marden served as editor-in-chief in supervising the publication of the Consolidated Encyclopedic Library (1903, 1906, 1907), a collaborative feign of nineteen volumes written for the gain of the general public and young people in particular. He was with a regular contributor to Elizabeth Towne’s New Thought magazine, Nautilus, during the first two decades of the twentieth century. During this grow old he served as the first president of the into the future New York City-based New Thought handing out League for the Larger Life.
Note: Information edited from Margaret Connolly’s The Life Story of Orison Swett Marden (1925) and Wende Marden Sinnaeve’s Out of the Ashes – The Life Story of Orison Swett Marden (2004). Those marked gone an asterisk are plausible approximates where no true year was found. Events where no approximate year can be ascertained are marked (–).