Orison Swett Marden Orison Swett Marden, founder of Success Magazine, is considered to be one of the most influential founders 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. The son of poor parents, he was born in 1850 in Thornton Gore, a New Hampshire hamlet, to Lewis and Martha Marden. His father was a farmer, hunter, and trapper. His mother stayed home and took care of Orison and his two sisters. Orison was a mere 3 years old when his mother died at the age of twenty-two. Though his father was devastated by the loss he did his best to raise his three children and provide for them their basic needs. An unfortunate accident occured in which his father was seriously injur Orphaned at the age of seven, he and his sisters were passed from guardian to guardian. This went on for many years. And through the hardships he experienced at the different homes as a "hired boy" it is likely that he developed much of his strong character and "iron will" during these times. While living and working at the Foss farm he found in the attic a self help book by Samuel Smiles. That fateful day was the turning point in his life. He felt as if he'd found a gold mine. The book 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. From that point on he was an unstoppable achiever. Through his increasing awareness of a "larger place" he began making great strides toward higher education at the nearest universities. Among the places he eventually attended, and acquired great honors, were Andover Theological Seminary, Harvard and Boston University. 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. He was a self-made man in every respect. 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. 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, (pub. 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 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 in the outreach of New Thought ideas into the general culture of his time.
His inspiring autobiography, OUT OF THE ASHES - The Life Story of Orison Swett Marden by Wende Marden Sinnaeve (his great-granddaughter) is available from Sunbooks.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN ONLINE BOOKS Free Marden ebooks from manybooks.net: Free Marden books at Project Gutenberg Excerpts from many of his books Prosperity - How To Attract It
OTHER OSM RESOURCES Various titles by Orison Swett Marden
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ed by a fallen tree trunk while setting a bear trap. Soon after the accident Lewis passed away and was buried along side his wife Martha.
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. Those remaining manuscripts are now the sole property of Brown University. They were donated by Donald Marden Fitch (Marden's grandson) and Mrs. W. Price Fitch (Marden's daughter).
