Success Manuals

The ideal of success has been a pervasive theme in American life, and prescriptions for achieving success have assumed a wide range of cultural forms. One of these has been the success manual, which experienced its greatest proliferation and impact on U.S. culture during the Gilded Age (1873–1900) and Progressive Era (1890–1915). Tailored toward male, middle-class audiences, success manuals equated success with manliness and gave detailed advice not only on choosing an occupation and developing a career, but on all forms of public and private behavior.

Advice literature, which has had a long history in American society, gained in significance with the onset of industrialization and economic expansion from the 1830s through 1850s. Books such as Sylvester Graham's A Lecture to Young Men (1834), John Todd's The Student's Manual (1835), William Alcott's The Young Man's Guide (1846), and Timothy Shay Arthur's Advice to Young Men (1848) counseled young men on dietary habits, urged temperance, and exhorted them against masturbation. These advice manuals promoted self-control as a mark of manliness in all walks of life.

[Page 443]By the 1870s, the success manual emerged as a distinct literary form, and the wide circulation of these manuals suggests their strong influence on ideas about manliness. Between 1870 and 1910, 144 new success manuals appeared on the market. Written by ministers, educators, and professional authors, they ranged from 300 to 800 pages in length. Sold by traveling agents on subscription plans, success manuals sold anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 copies per title. Each title cost between two and four dollars—about one-quarter to one-half of an average weekly salary—with the most expensive manuals costing five dollars. Their content was culled from popular biographies, histories, and encyclopedias, and was heavily adorned with evocative illustrations. Two of the six national nonfiction best-sellers between 1870 and 1910—Thomas L. Haines and Levi W. Yaggy's The Royal Path of Life, or Aims and Aids to Success and Happiness (1879) and Frank Channing Haddock's The Power of Will: A Practical Companion Book for Unfoldment of the Powers of Mind (1907)—belonged to the success manual genre.

The authors of these success manuals experienced the transformations of the market revolution and were uniquely positioned to articulate changing currents of masculinity. More educated than most Americans, yet often of rural background, they belonged to a distinct generation that came of age between 1835 and 1880. Perhaps the most famous success manual author was Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924). Orphaned as a child, Marden grew up in five different foster families but went on to become an accomplished man. By 1882, he had acquired several degrees, including a medical degree from Harvard University and a law degree from Boston University. In 1894, he published Pushing to the Front, the first and most popular of his thirty success manuals. It went through 12 editions in 1894, and by 1925 had gone through 250 editions and been translated into 25 languages; one million copies were sold in Japan alone. In addition to his prolific efforts as an author and compiler of such success manuals, Marden also became the founder and editor of Success Magazine (1897–1911). Marden and other success-manual authors offered readers the simple message that hard work and good habits—called character by nineteenth-century Americans—contributed to manhood and success.

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