His bibliography runs to a hundred or more volumes--a colossal, relentless, overwhelming deluge of bilge. All his books have the same subject: getting on in the world. That was, to him, the only conceivable goal of human aspiration. Day in and day out, for three decades, he preached his simple gospel to all mankind, not only in his books, but also in countless pamphlets, in lectures, and in the pages of his magazine, _Success_. Its success was instantaneous and durable. His first book, “Pushing to the Front,” rapidly went through a dozen editions, and was presently translated into a dozen foreign languages. It remained, to the end, his best-seller, but it had many formidable rivals. Altogether, his writings in book-form must have reached a total of 20,000,000 copies, including 3,000,000 in twenty-five tongues other than English. In Germany alone he sold more than 500,000 copies of thirty volumes. He remains to-day the most popular of American authors in Europe, and by immense odds. I have encountered translations of his books on the news-stands of remote towns in Spain, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. In places where even Mark Twain is unknown--nay, even Jack London, Upton Sinclair and James Oliver Curwood--he holds aloft the banner of American literature. I lack the stomach for the job myself, but I think a lot could be learned about the psychology of _Homo boobiens_ through an intensive study of Marden’s vast shelf of books. The few I have read seem to be exactly alike; no doubt all the rest resemble them very closely. What they preach, in brief, is the high value of hopefulness, hard work, high purpose and unflagging resolution. The appeal is to the natural discontent and vague aspiration of the common man. The remedy offered is partly practical and partly mystical--practical in its insistence upon the sound utility of the lowly virtues, mystical in its constant implication that matter will always yield to mind, that high thinking has a cash value. An evil philosophy? Surely not. A valid one? There it is not so easy to answer. Marden is full of proofs that what he preaches works--but only too often those proofs show the incredible appositeness and impeccability of patent-medicine testimonials. How many false hopes he must have raised in his day! One imagines humble hearts leaping to the gaudy tales of Judge Elbert Gary, Beethoven and Edison in the darkest reaches of Montenegro, Norway and Tennessee. Down went the dose, but was the patient actually cured? Well, perhaps, he at least _felt_ better--and that was something. Marden was not to be pinned down to clinical records; he was, in his way, a poet, and even more a prophet. A religious exaltation was in him; he knew how to roll his eyes. The first article of his creed was that it was a sin to despair--that realism was a black crime against the Holy Ghost. He reduced the Beatitudes to one: Blessed are they that believe in their stars, and are up and doing.