1848–1924 · American self-help author, founder of Success magazine — and only the messenger on this one
Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924) lost his mother at three and his father at seven, and worked his way to a string of degrees from Boston University and a medical degree from Harvard. Wikipedia calls Pushing to the Front (1894) “the single greatest runaway classic in the history of personal development books at that time”; he went on to found Success magazine in 1897, which reached a circulation of around half a million. He is on this page not because he coined the sculpture joke but because he printed one of its clearest early versions — and, to his credit, made no attempt to attach a famous name to it.