any a book is marketed as a recipe for success or a formula for inspirational change. But, it appears, some recipes for success and wellsprings of life-altering change are found in unlikely literary sources.

These days, Steve Kavalgian is the president of Mill River Media in Old Lyme, Conn. He's a publisher's representative, selling advertising space in journals of medicine and professional societies. Life, he says, is terrific.

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But a few years ago, in 1996, things weren't so good. Mr. Kavalgian had had a wonderful business in New York, also as a publisher's representative, for 16 years, but eventually, he says, "the bottom fell out."

"It may sound strange that a novel rather than a business text or how-to book was the help I used" in the aftermath, he writes.

"I was depressed, concerned I wasn't going to make my mortgage payment, my son's college bills or even pay the most minor expenses," he says of that time. "On a business trip, I bought a paperback in an airport newsstand because the cover looked exciting. Here began the adventures of soldiers in Burma, Germany and Vietnam, fighting for their lives, covering each other's butts, dealing with military bureaucracy in an attempt to survive and go home. Here were men exhibiting courage in the face of death, exhibiting bravery in what seemed like impossible situations and exhibiting the strength to get the job done."

Mr. Kavalgian had discovered the novels of Leonard B. Scott, including "Charlie Mike," "The Last Run," "The Expendables," "Forged in Honor" and "The Iron Men."

Mr. Kavalgian writes, "The characters in the stories showed me that even in the worst of scenarios, they could prevail, and so could I."

He took a series of jobs. He got one as a part-time pharmaceutical representative. He worked part-time for the United Parcel Service deliverying packages. He started selling photographic equipment at camera shows, and he got a new journal client.

"It all worked," he says. "I survived and came home."

Ben Friedell, a physician in Oneonta, N.Y., offers a prescription — one that changed the way he practices his profession.

It is "A Whole New Life" by Reynolds Price.

"He is a novelist and teacher of English at Duke University who developed a tumor on his spinal cord, which ultimately left him paraplegic and in constant pain," Dr. Friedell writes. "Yet he continues to teach and write, adapting to his new body to continue to do the things he loves.

"I am a family physician who deals with many patients with chronic pain and physical disabilities which challenge them. Price's story has given me, as an able-bodied person, an insight into the life of those with pain and disabilities.

"I recommend this book to anyone in the health professions."

Poetry was the answer for Carol LaChapelle of Chicago.

"In 1985, while stuck in a hateful administrative job at a local university, I registered for a seminar in English literature at the Newberry Library in Chicago," Ms. LaChapelle writes.

"I needed something uplifting and inspiring to keep me from quitting outright — never a good career move.

"The seminar focused on `Lyrical Ballads,' a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1798.

"What I didn't know but learned during the eight-week class was how situated these poets were in the revolutionary times within which they wrote," Ms. LaChapelle writes. "England was in the midst of a massive cultural revolution, moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy. There were the American Revolution, of course, and the fall of the Bastille in 1789.

"Learning all this, seeing this revered poet, a laureate of England, as a young fired-up revolutionary, both politically and artistically," she says, referring to Wordsworth, "put me in mind of my own generation's coming of age in the 1960's.

"But the most important thing I learned during that seminar, and the reading of the `Lyrical Ballads,' was of the quiet, yet insistent power of literature to connect the experience of a 20th-century American woman with that of a canonical male writer two centuries earlier.