Nonfiction · 1915
Acres of Diamonds
Our Every-day Opportunities
Russell H. Conwell's famous lecture, delivered here much as he actually gave it: a Persian farmer named Ali Hafed, told by a wandering priest that a single diamond could buy him a province, sells his own farm and dies penniless still searching the world over for the diamond mines he never finds — while the stranger who buys his land discovers, in the very brook running through its garden, one of the richest diamond deposits ever known. Conwell drives the parable's point home with dozens of American examples of opportunity sitting unnoticed close to hand, arguing that most people go looking for their fortune in exactly the wrong direction. This edition also carries Robert Shackleton's biographical essay "His Life and Achievement," tracing Conwell from Civil War officer and lawyer to Baptist minister and founder of Temple University, and closes with Conwell's own short memoir of his career, "Fifty Years on the Lecture Platform."
Conwell wrote and delivered versions of "Acres of Diamonds" for decades beginning in the 1870s, revising it for each city and audience; he claimed to have given it some six thousand times, donating most of its considerable proceeds to the university he had founded. Harper & Brothers published this combined edition — the lecture together with Shackleton's tribute and Conwell's own reminiscence — in 1915, ten years before Conwell's death.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text: the prefatory "An Appreciation," the full lecture, all nine chapters of Shackleton's "His Life and Achievement," and Conwell's "Fifty Years on the Lecture Platform."
Contents
- An Appreciation
- Acres of Diamonds
- His Life and Achievements
- II — The Beginning at Old Lexington
- III — Story of the Fifty-Seven Cents
- IV — His Power as Orator and Preacher
- V — Gift for Inspiring Others
- VI — Millions of Hearers
- VII — How a University Was Founded
- VIII — His Splendid Efficiency
- IX — The Story of Acres of Diamonds
- Fifty Years on the Lecture Platform
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1843–1925 · Victorian
Russell H. Conwell (1843–1925) was born in South Worthington, Massachusetts, and left law studies at Yale in 1862 to raise and command a company in the Civil War. Admitted to the bar in 1865, he practiced law before his ordination as a Baptist minister in 1881; called the next year to Philadelphia's struggling Grace Baptist Church, he built it into the Baptist Temple and, in 1884, founded night classes for working students that grew into Temple University, of which he served as first president from 1887. His lecture "Acres of Diamonds," urging listeners to find opportunity where they already stood, was delivered by his own count some six thousand times over five decades and funded much of the university's growth. He died in Philadelphia.
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