“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you; they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”                            Bernice Johnson Reagon

1893 – Midway Hotel – Kearney, Nebraska: Shortly before sunrise, hotel proprietor Orison Marden awoke to the smell of smoke in his 4^th floor room. He opened the door and saw the hallway was an inferno. Dropping to his knees, he crawled past falling timbers to the stairs. Marden escaped with only the nightshirt he was wearing. His hotel, the largest in Kearney, burned to the ground.

Everything Marden owned went up in smoke that morning, including his most prized possession, roughly five thousand pages of hand-written notes and text, which he carried with him in a large satchel. This ever-present bag contained scores of notebooks representing 15 years of work, the fruit of his spare time. He planned to use the information to one day write a self-help book.

While the hotel ruins still smoldered, Marden walked down the street, bought some clothes and a twenty-five-cent notebook. Later that day, he began to rewrite from memory the manuscript of his book.

Marden grew up on a small farm in New Hampshire. His mother died when he was three, leaving his father to raise young Marden and his two sisters. Four years later, when their father was killed in an accident on the farm, the children were orphaned and shuttled between several foster families. At age ten, Marden began hiring himself out to local farms to help support his sisters, and over the next decade he lived and worked as a hired hand on five different farms.

At age 15, while exploring the attic of the farmhouse where he lived, Marden discovered a dog-eared book, Self Help, written in 1845 by Scottish author Samuel Smiles. Captivated by what he read, Marden committed large segments of the 325-page book to memory. It sparked a flame in him to find a way to overcome his difficult circumstances. He dreamed of becoming the Samuel Smiles of America.

Marden attended Andover Theological Seminary in Boston for a year before deciding the ministry was not his calling. While working in a hotel, he paid his way through Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1877. After being promoted to hotel manager, Marden simultaneously attended Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School, earning his M.D. in 1881 and his J.D. a year later.

Despite his impressive academic credentials, Dr. Marden pursued a hotel management career. In the mid-1880s, he purchased his first hotel, The Manisses, in Rhode Island. Over the next few years, he purchased two hotels in Nebraska and one in South Dakota. By day Marden managed his hotel business, but he never lost sight of his dream to write. At night and on weekends he worked on his first book.

The hotel fire was the turning point in Orison Marden’s life. At age 44, he decided to dedicate himself to a career in writing. He returned to Boston, rented a small room in a boarding house, and worked exclusively on rewriting the manuscripts.

December 1, 1894, a year after the fire, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company published Marden’s first book, Pushing to the Front. The 475-page encyclopedia for success was a runaway classic on leadership and self-development. U.S. Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson acknowledged the book’s role in their success, as did industrialists Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison.

In 1897, Marden founded Success magazine. The monthly magazine, headquartered in New York, eventually required a staff of 200 employees and grew to have a circulation of 500,000 subscribers. Marden interviewed prominent men of the Gilded Age, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan and published articles about how they overcame obstacles and became successful in their lives and businesses.

Marden’s impact extended far beyond his writing. He was a sought-after speaker and lecturer who captivated audiences with his eloquence and passion for personal growth. Before his death in 1924, at age 74, Marden wrote more than fifty books and articles on personal improvement and success, including He Can Who Thinks He Can.

 Rising from the ashes of his Midway Hotel fire, Orison Marden fulfilled his boyhood dream to impact America as Samuel Smiles had impacted Scotland in the mid-1800s. Today, a century after his death, Marden’s influence can still be found in the success literature of America.