Outside of its title, The Road Less Traveled never mentions the poem from which it takes its name. But Peck’s reading of Frost is probably even stronger for being implicit. “Life is difficult,” begins The Road Less Traveled, and you can tell Peck means it, because he gives those three words their very own paragraph. What we need to learn, he goes on to argue, is self-discipline. This will allow us to see that “the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” Later, we will discover that in order to follow “the road of spiritual growth,” we must “begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar.” The book is essentially a three-hundred-page elaboration of the message most people attribute to “The Road Not Taken”: Life is a hard, lonely, but ultimately triumphant struggle.

This has become a popular idea—a very, very popular idea. The self-improvement market, which includes books, seminars, “life coaches,” motivational speakers, and so forth, is now generally estimated at twelve billion dollars a year in the United States alone. (Self-help is “predominantly an American phenomenon,” as City Journal puts it.) There are in the ballpark of fifty thousand self-improvement books in print, and each year another three or four thousand new titles embark upon a massive salmon run up the guru’s mountain. That’s a lot of money to choose to pay, and a lot of books to choose to buy, all in order to become “the decider.”