English language
Published July 28, 2006
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
3 stars
(1 review)
How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day is a short self-help book "about the daily organization of time" by novelist Arnold Bennett. Written originally as a series of articles in the London Evening News in 1907, it was published in book form in 1908. Aimed initially at "the legions of clerks and typists and other meanly paid workers caught up in the explosion of British office jobs around the turn of the [twentieth] century", it was one of several "pocket philosophies" by Bennett that "offered a strong message of hope from somebody who so well understood their lives". The book was especially successful in the US, where Henry Ford bought 500 copies to give to his friends and employees. Bennett himself said that the book "has brought me more letters of appreciation than all my other books put together".In her book The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern …
How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day is a short self-help book "about the daily organization of time" by novelist Arnold Bennett. Written originally as a series of articles in the London Evening News in 1907, it was published in book form in 1908. Aimed initially at "the legions of clerks and typists and other meanly paid workers caught up in the explosion of British office jobs around the turn of the [twentieth] century", it was one of several "pocket philosophies" by Bennett that "offered a strong message of hope from somebody who so well understood their lives". The book was especially successful in the US, where Henry Ford bought 500 copies to give to his friends and employees. Bennett himself said that the book "has brought me more letters of appreciation than all my other books put together".In her book The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature, Harvard academic Beth Blum argued that "Bennett's essays on the art of living mount a challenge against modernism's disdain for the crude utilitarianism of public taste" and saw Virginia Woolf's hostility to Bennett as "defined, in part, as an inspired rebuttal of Bennett's practical philosophies". In a 2019 New York Times article, Cal Newport recommended How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day as an inspiration for anyone embarking on a program of "digital decluttering".
