"Desiderata" is an early 1920s prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann. Although he copyrighted it in 1927, he distributed copies of it without a required copyright notice during 1933 and c. 1942, thereby forfeiting his US copyright. Largely unknown in the author's lifetime, its use in devotional and spoken word recordings in 1960 and 1971 called it to the attention of the world.
