Bessie Anderson Stanley

A short life in the record

Bessie Anderson Stanley was an American writer best known for a brief piece called “Success,” also known by the titles “What is success?” and “What Constitutes Success?” She was born Caroline Elizabeth Anderson on March 25, 1879, in Newton, Iowa. In 1900 she married Arthur Jehu Stanley, and after that marriage she lived in Lincoln, Kansas. Her life crossed the turn of the twentieth century, a period when magazine contests and popular quotation books helped short moral essays and verses circulate widely.

Stanley’s lasting public identity rests on a single work, written in 1904 for a contest held in Brown Book Magazine, published by George Livingston Richards Co. of Boston, Massachusetts. The contest asked entrants to answer one direct question: “What is success?” The answer had to be 100 words or less. Stanley submitted her response in the form of an essay, rather than as a poem, and won first prize. The award was $250, a substantial recognition for a short piece built around a plain question.

Because the piece later became known as a poem, its origins are easy to miss. It began not as a book-length project, not as part of a public office or a literary program, but as a concise answer shaped by the rules of a magazine competition. Those rules mattered. They required compression, clarity, and a definition broad enough to satisfy the prompt without exceeding the limit. What shaped Stanley’s best-known writing, at least in the record available, was that demand to say much in few words.

The authorship of “Success”

“Success” traveled widely after its first appearance, but not always with Stanley’s name attached. It has often been incorrectly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson or Robert Louis Stevenson. Ann Landers and her sister Abby are also said to have misattributed it to Emerson, and Ann Landers’s concession to a public correction appears in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia. The repeated errors show how easily a short, quotable piece can pass from hand to hand until its author becomes blurred.

The piece appeared in More Heart Throbs, volume 2, in 1911, on pages 1–2. It was also included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in the 1930s or 1940s, removed in the 1960s, and later included again in the seventeenth edition. That publication history helps explain why Stanley’s name continues to matter on a quotations site: her best-known words became familiar partly because they were copied, collected, corrected, and argued over.

Bessie Anderson Stanley died on October 2, 1952, at the age of 73. The verse for which she is remembered is inscribed on her gravestone in Lincoln Cemetery, Kansas. For readers, the appeal of “Success” lies in its directness. It began with a simple question, answered under a strict limit, and its later history reminds us that even a very short piece of writing can outlive confusion over who wrote it.