Original editorial artwork; not a historical photograph.
Legacy · 1850–1924
Orison Swett Marden
Founder of SUCCESS magazine and the most prolific author of American self-improvement literature.
Orphaned young and self-made, Marden built a hotel business, lost it to fire, and turned to writing. Pushing to the Front arrived in 1894 and launched a career of some fifty books urging persistence, character, and ambition.
In 1897 he founded SUCCESS magazine, which gave the whole achievement genre a periodical home and a name.
1894
Pushing to the Front
1897
founded SUCCESS magazine
50+
books written
Ideas associated with the work
- Character as the ground of achievement
- Persistence through reversal
- Self-education as a lifelong duty
- Optimism as a working method
Start with the most famous book
Pushing to the Front
“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.”
— Orison Swett Marden, Pushing to the Front (1894)
Why this master matters
Marden founded SUCCESS magazine and effectively invented the success-literature genre as a publishing category. The modern shelf of achievement writing — Hill included — grew directly out of the market he built.
Ideas in practice
Understand the teaching.
01
Character is the asset
Marden's success is built on reliability, industry and self-respect long before it is built on technique.
02
Expectancy
He treats hopeful expectation as an energising force, not a mood — something to be cultivated deliberately each morning.
03
Begin where you stand
His examples are relentlessly about people who started with nothing notable and moved anyway.
Signature works
Start with the books.
Explore a short reading list, with purchasing links that support ManyMasters.
Start here
Pushing to the Front
The book that defined the genre: hundreds of short, vivid chapters on character, persistence and ambition.
Explore editionsChoosing an edition
These titles are long out of copyright, so editions range from careful annotated reprints to hasty print-on-demand scans. Before buying, check that the listing names a publisher, shows a readable interior sample, and keeps the original chapter structure intact.
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Choose your path
Read for what you need now.
Historical context
This work belongs to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century New Thought movement. Read it as historical writing on belief, attention and character rather than as medical, psychological or financial advice, and treat the biographical stories that grew up around these figures as tradition rather than documented fact.