George S. Clason’s life reads a little bit like the American Dream.
Born in 1874 in the small river town of Louisiana, Missouri, his early years were pretty ordinary. He went to college in Nebraska and served as a civil engineer during the Spanish-American War. But after the war, his life turned a corner.
Still not sure about his career path, Clason moved to Denver, Colorado, and began working in the mining industry.1 But it wasn’t long before his entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and took him in a completely different direction. Like many business pioneers, he saw a problem and created a solution.
Clason saw two important cultural shifts taking shape in those early years of the twentieth century. First, Americans were falling in love with the automobile. Cars were becoming more affordable, and folks were hitting the road more often. Second, many of those new car owners were migrating west. But they weren’t always sure where to go or how to get there.
The Clason Map Company pointed them in the right direction.
Clason started making maps in 1902, focusing on Colorado and a few other western states. But the business quickly grew into one of the most popular—and profitable—map companies in America. By 1923, Clason Maps had made history by publishing the first-ever full atlas of the United States and Canada.2
Long before Zig Ziglar made the idea famous, George Clason discovered that when you help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money. He built a thriving company simply by giving people what they needed to turn their dreams into reality.
But Clason didn’t just give customers a reliable map. He also showed potential investors where to find energy resources (like coal, gas, or oil). And he researched and shared important information about key cities and tourist attractions.3 With these personal touches, the Clason Map Company grew into the largest map producer west of the Mississippi River.4
Then came the crash.
The Wall Street plunge of October 1929 turned America’s economic boom into a bust. As the Great Depression took hold across the nation, economic growth came to a screeching halt. People stopped traveling as much—and they stopped buying maps. As a result, the Clason Map Company went bankrupt in 1932.5
But like any resourceful businessman, Clason saw another opportunity. While his map business was still prospering, he had started writing and publishing stories about financial success. After the crash, these simple parables became even more important to Americans who were struggling to find—and keep—enough money to survive. Clason’s stories gave them commonsense advice about living on less than you make and saving part of your income for hard times.
These easy-to-understand stories caught the imagination of many Americans. Eventually, they became so popular that he collected his favorites, and in 1930, he published them as a book called The Richest Man in Babylon.6 As Clason shared in the book’s original foreword, he set the stories in Babylon because that’s where common sense with money started. He even called it the “cradle in which was nurtured the basic principles of finance now recognized and used the world over.”
The book’s principles became a long-standing success, and Clason was able to rebuild his financial nest egg. He spent his later years in Napa, California, where he died in 1957. But the impact of The Richest Man in Babylon lives on and continues to influence millions of readers each year—as it has for almost a century.