Born in 1848, Dr. Orison Swett Marden is the author of Pushing To The Front, the 1894 self-improvement classic that inspired some of the most successful and disruptive entrepreneurs of the modern era. A successful hotelier before he turned to authorship, Marden founded SUCCESS magazine based on the runaway success of Pushing To The Front and continued to publish 50 more books and pamphlets, an average of two a year, until he passed away in 1924.

Orphaned at the age of seven, Orison Swett Marden lived with a series of guardians, often working as a “hired boy” to earn his keep with the families who housed him. As a teenager, he discovered in the attic of his current home the aptly-named and before-its-time book Self-Help by Scottish author Samuel Smiles. Marden was blown away by the insights in the book, referring to it as “worth its weight in diamonds”, and this led to a complete mindset shift.

What followed were a string of achievements that laid the groundwork for his later success. He earned several degrees, putting himself through college by working at hotels. He quickly progressed to owning hotels, and maintained a profitable portfolio until his 40s before deciding to follow in the footsteps of Samuel Smiles and write books that would, if successful, inspire other people to similar success.

Marden had produced more than 5,000 pages of manuscript when disaster struck. Living in one of his hotels, Marden awoke to the sound of emergency to discover that the hotel had caught fire in the night. Marden barely escaped with his life. The hotel burned to the ground … and Marden’s manuscript went up in smoke with it.

Initially distraught at the loss, Marden nevertheless recovered and methodically set about writing his manuscript from scratch. The result, Pushing To The Front, was an immediate best-seller. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley were fans, and leaders such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and J. P. Morgan cited them as inspiration, placing Pushing To The Front into the spotlight of the entire modern era.

Pushing to the Front (1894)

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