Caroline Elizabeth “Bessie” Anderson Stanley (1879–1952) was an American homemaker and writer from Lincoln, Kansas. In 1904 she entered a magazine contest asking readers to define success in about a hundred words; her entry won first prize and was reprinted in the Emporia Gazette in 1905 and later in the anthology More Heart Throbs (1911). Her short paragraph on success went on to be widely reworded and, from 1951, misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.