Dale Carnegie

Their life

Missouri farm boy turned teacher of confidence. His How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) — grown out of two decades teaching public speaking at the YMCA — became one of the best-selling books ever written, and invented the modern genre of practical advice on people: remember names, give honest appreciation, become genuinely interested in others.

Known for

• How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
• founding the Dale Carnegie Course
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948)
• pioneering practical self-help writing
• YMCA public-speaking classes
• principles like genuine interest and honest appreciation

The road they walked

Dale Carnegie was born Dale Carnagey in 1888 in a one-room farmhouse near Maryville, Missouri, the son of a struggling farmer whose land was periodically flooded by the Missouri River. Poverty pushed him toward self-reliance early: he milked cows before dawn to afford tuition at the State Teachers College in Warrensburg, and there discovered debate and public speaking as a way to matter in a room. After graduating he sold correspondence courses and bacon for Armour and Company, tried his hand at acting in New York, and failed at both in ways that left him broke and living at the YMCA on 125th Street.

It was that YMCA, in 1912, that gave him his opening: he talked its director into letting him teach a night class in public speaking to clerks, salesmen, and businessmen, paid not a salary but a cut of the door. The America he was teaching in was rapidly urbanizing and newly white-collar — a nation of men who had left farms and small towns for offices and sales floors, where advancement depended less on manual skill than on the ability to speak up, make an impression, and be liked. Carnegie built his course around real stories, not rhetoric textbooks, having students stand and simply talk about something they knew. He changed the spelling of his name to Carnegie, likely to catch some of the shine of Andrew Carnegie's fame, and by the 1920s his classes had grown into the Dale Carnegie Course, taught in cities across the country.

In 1936, at the urging of a Simon & Schuster editor, he distilled two decades of classroom notes and observed human behavior into How to Win Friends and Influence People. It sold out its first printing overnight and went on to become one of the best-selling nonfiction books in American history, translated into dozens of languages. The book effectively invented a genre — plainspoken, actionable advice on getting along with people — and turned Carnegie from a night-school instructor into a national institution, his name licensed to training programs still taught in businesses worldwide long after his death.

How their story ended

Dale Carnegie died on November 1, 1955, at his home in Forest Hills, New York, at age 66. He had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and his health declined over his final months even as his courses and books continued to spread internationally. He was buried in his home state of Missouri, near the farmland where he had grown up believing that ordinary people could learn, quite deliberately, how to deal with one another.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

From the Journal