In this book
Lothrop Stoddard has gathered together more than two hundred tales of luck, running the gamut of life from
Napoleon to
Texas Guinan and
Jack Dempsey, and dealing with such permutations of fate as one's chances of being born or winning at
Monte Carlo. There are tales of "The Lottery of Life," "Luck and Religion," "Luck and Science,"
Luck in sport, history, business, politics, and in everyday life. These stories have been laboriously gathered with the help of a considerable number of notables and others, and their authenticity has been carefully checked upon. "Luck the Universal Element" gets into the philosophy of the thing and has more fact and truth in it than most of the legends of Samuel Smiles or the ultra-orthodox tales of providential directing.Life is not made a thing of luck, but
luck plays an amazing part in life. There are times that, taken at their tide, lead to fortune, and there are pieces of fortune which take time and toil by the forelock and pitch them into disaster.Reformatted in this new updated edition. Where possible, we have corrected grammatical errors, including punctuation and obsolete spelling. We have deleted hyphens in words that were hyphenated in 1929 but no longer are. No correction has altered or changed the author's intent or meaning.
