Orison
Swett
Marden
  
Orison Swett Marden, founder of Success Magazine, is also considered to be the founder of the modern success movement in America.  He certainly bridged the gap between the old, narrow notions of success and the new, more comprehensive models made popular by best-selling authors such as Napoleon Hill, Clement Stone, Dale Carnegie, Og Mandino, Earl Nightingale, Norman Vincent Peale, and today's authors Stephen R.Covey, Anthony Robbins, and Brian Tracy.

Who was Orison Swett Marden?

He was the son of poor parents, born on a New England farm in 1850.  He attended Boston University, and also Andover Theological Seminary.
Graduating from Boston University in 1871, he took an M.D. at Harvard in
1881, an LL.B. degree, also at Harvard, in 1882, and studied at the
Boston School of Oratory.

During his college days he worked at catering and hotel management and
was so successful that he had some $20,000 in capital when he finished
his formal training.  Then he went to Block Island, near Newport, Rhode
Island, and bought a property which he developed into a thriving resort
area.  Hardly a background, one would think, for a later literary career.
He went on to buy a chain of hotels in Nebraska, but in 1892 met
financial reverses and had to take employment once more as a hotel
manager in Chicago during the World's Fair of 1893.  Then he went back to Boston and started over again.

When he first met Samuel Smiles is not disclosed, but the English
writer became his first literary hero and inspired much that Marden
wrote and accomplished.  Smiles's Self-Help, which he had found in an
attic and read, did much in the shaping of his career.  He once wrote,
"The little book was the friction which wakened the spark sleeping in
the flint."  Later of course he also read Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Longfellow, Phillips Brooks, and others, but Smiles was the "awakener." 
It became his ambition, he says, to become the Samuel Smiles of America, and there is little doubt that he achieved his ambition.

On his return to Boston, he began to try to put together his ideas,
particularly concerning optimism, which was to be a central theme in his
writings -- incidentally also a central theme in New Thought.  While
most of his books make little or no mention of religion, some do.  Marden
was rather a writer of essentially New Thought faith than a writer
technically on New Thought as such.  Actually he was for several years
president of the League for a Higher Life, A New Thought organization in
New York City of which Eugene del Mar was for many years the effective
leader, and of which Robert H. Bitzer, longtime president of the INTA,
was onetime secretary.

Marden's first book, Pushing to the Front, published in 1894, had a
phenomenal circulation.  In 1897 he founded Success Magazine, which
reached the enormous circulation, for that time, of nearly a
half-million, meaning of course that it was read by from two to three
million readers.  This publication ran into financial difficulties and
suspended publication in 1912.  But once again, in 1918, he founded a new Success which was rapidly climbing in circulation when death ended his career in 1924.

His book titles express eloquently the outlook of cheerful optimism and
confidence.  At his death it was said of him that he averaged two books a year, from his first in 1894 to his last just before his passing in 1924, and had some two million words in as yet unpublished manuscripts
when he died.  His writings are definitely in the New Thought tradition,
though, in common with those of Ralph Waldo Trine, another prolific
author of this period, they wear a cloak of orthodoxy which enabled them to reach a far larger readership than many other authors in this field.

Marden was a definite and highly influential figure, whether consciously or not, in the outreach of New Thought ideas into the general culture of his time.
  

  

About our people pages:
Because many visitors have asked for more information about particular people whose words appear on the site, we'll try to give you as much information as we can about individuals.  The Amazon links should give you access to works by the author, though at times they'll display other books if the author has written an essay or introduction for those books.
  

Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt or thought has had its hand in molding us, shaping us.

Orison Swett Marden