George Samuel Clason was born on 7 November 1874 in Louisiana, Missouri. He attended the University of Nebraska and served in the United States Army during the Spanish-American War. In the early years of the twentieth century he turned to commerce, founding the Clason Map Company in Denver, Colorado. The company published the first road atlas of the United States and Canada, expanding to offices in Chicago and Los Angeles as the automobile age opened demand for navigational print. That instinct for practical, widely distributed information would carry directly into his later writing.
In 1926 Clason began issuing a series of pamphlets on thrift and financial management, each built around parables set in ancient Babylon. The device — concrete fictional characters working through debt, saving, and investment — made the principles accessible without requiring readers to navigate economic theory. Banks and insurance companies distributed the pamphlets widely, reaching millions of households. They were later collected and published as The Richest Man in Babylon, a volume that distilled a simple sequence: pay yourself first, live within your means, put money to work.
Clason spent his later years in Napa, California, and died in 1957. The book assembled from those pamphlets never went out of print. It remains on personal-finance reading lists nearly a century after the first pamphlet appeared, recommended by financial advisers who find the Babylonian parable format easier to pass on than technical instruction. The core arguments — save a portion of everything you earn, avoid debt, invest patiently — continue to circulate largely unchanged, in editions published by Penguin Random House among others.
The Richest Man in Babylon
Timeless financial wisdom through Babylonian parables — pay yourself first, make your money work for you, guard against loss.