A cheerful book preaching self-reinvention to a nation defined by self-invention

Posted Wednesday morning, July 29, 2020.

Detail from “Sunday” by Edward Hopper. 1926. Courtesy of the Phillips Collection. Washington D.C.

Considering how dismal things are, I'd say the book is ripe for re-discovery, but it's never gone undiscovered. Poet and essayist, Jay Parini ranks it as one of thirteen books that have had the most influence on how Americans see themselves, a fundamental book of our secular scripture, alongside, among others, "Walden", "On the Road", "The Autobiography of Ben Franklin", and "The Feminine Mystique"...

People often feel helpless, out of their depth, powerless. The boss frightens them. The have few real friends, or imagine this is so. The way forward in life looks impossible, a thicket through which no obvious path seems to lead. Failure looms. In the United States where failure is shameful and success has become something of a religion, there has always been a need for advice about how to get ahead. In this realm, no book has been more successful at the business of success than How to Win Friends and Influence People...by Dale Carnegie…

It appeared in the dark of the Great Depression, when breadlines formed in the streets of cities and towns across the country. Never had failure been so palpable, so vividly on display. Men could no longer occupy the sacred pedestal of “breadwinner.” Children were hungry. Women felt helpless to support their families. Employment was scarce, and so the competition for the few precious jobs became cutthroat. In the midst of this dismal scene came Dale Carnegie, with a cheerful book that turned the heads of millions, giving them a specific way to reinvent themselves in a country where self-invention itself defines our culture. With its frank, confident tone, the book blazed like a grass fire in the windy drought, with seventeen printings in just a few months, by the time of Carnegie’s death in 1955, over five million copies had been sold in the United States alone. The book had been translated into over thirty languages. Nearly half a million people had taken courses on public speaking and self-improvement at the Dale Carnegie Institute, with its many branches. More important, this book had changed lives.

--- Jay Parini, in his essay on “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America”.

Comments

[Crprod]

I’ve never read Dale Carnegie's book. My connection to it is recalling Boston sportswriter Bud Collins’s description of Dick Williams, the 1967 manager, as “the only man Dale Carnegie ever punched in the nose."