Magnificent Obsession is difficult to classify. It refuses to fit any conventional niche. It is a novel, but more than a novel. Its characters live. They plumb the depths and they scale the heights. A rich and dissolute wastrel is transformed into a skillful surgeon. At what appalling cost? By what astounding means?

Magnificent Obsession probes below the surface of life. It searches out the causes for social behavior in the days of confusion through which we have passed. It cuts a pathway to cleaner, richer living for the future. It is a book which is acclaimed because of the new and sure philosophy of life which it reveals.

"I do not read many books," wrote a great educator recently, "but I never lost interest in this one. the story is vivid, the love plot fascinating, but there is something far beyond all this that gripped and held me."

It is this "something beyond" peculiar to Magnificient Obsession which has made it the most loved and the most discussed book of the decade.

From the dust jacket of the 1929 Grosset and Dunlap edition