Talks with Great Workers

Talks with Great Workers is a self-improvement and inspirational book by Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924), the American author who essentially founded the modern American self-improvement genre with his 1894 book Pushing to the Front and who produced more than fifty subsequent books in the same general mode across the following three decades.

Marden’s life had been the basic American self-improvement story he then sold to other readers. He had been orphaned at seven and worked his way through poverty and various menial jobs to eventual graduate education at Boston University. He built up a chain of hotels in New England that made him wealthy in the 1880s and 1890s. After his hotel properties burned in a substantial fire that nearly ruined him in 1893, he turned to writing as his main occupation and produced Pushing to the Front as his statement of the principles he believed had carried him through the various difficulties of his career.

Talks with Great Workers belongs to the substantial body of Marden books that followed. The format combines biographical material on successful figures from American and European public life with the moral and practical lessons that Marden drew from their careers. Various subjects appear including business leaders, scientists, inventors, writers, and political figures, each presented in terms of the personal qualities that Marden believed had produced their success.

The Marden formula was simple and worked across many books. The reader was assumed to be struggling young Americans trying to find a path through the difficult economic conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The successful figures profiled in the books had all started from similar difficulties. The personal qualities that distinguished them were available to any reader willing to apply them seriously. The result was inspirational reading that combined practical career advice with broader moral framework.

Marden’s books sold widely across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and influenced the developing American self-improvement genre that would later produce Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and the various others. The substantial influence on Hill in particular was direct, with Hill having explicitly modeled his own career on Marden’s example.

The book runs about three hundred pages. For readers interested in late-nineteenth-century American self-improvement literature, Marden is essential.