Author
Dale Carnegie
The Missouri farm boy whose 1936 course on dealing with people is still the honest version of persuasion.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 on a farm in Missouri, trained as a teacher, and worked as a salesman and an aspiring actor before he found his subject: teaching adults to speak in public, which he began doing at a YMCA in New York in 1912. The public-speaking course grew into a course on dealing with people, and the course into a book.
How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936, during the Depression, and became one of the best-known self-help books ever written; it has never been out of print. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living followed in 1948. He died in 1955, and the training organisation that carries his name continued teaching his courses around the world.
The book is built from the stories of his students and from the lives of people he admired, Lincoln above all, rather than from research, which came decades later and largely confirmed him.
The signature
Carnegie's signature is sincerity as method: genuine interest, remembering names, letting the other person talk, admitting your own errors first, letting people save face. He wrote plainly, in anecdotes, and he insisted that the techniques only work when they are not techniques — that flattery is detected and interest is felt.