At a glance
- Age
- 66
- Born
- November 24, 1888
- From
- Maryville
- Nationality
- United States
Biography
The book that keeps his name in circulation is *How to Win Friends and Influence People*, published in 1936 and still selling. Its subject is interpersonal skill — how people talk to each other, how they persuade, how they avoid giving offence — and it made a teacher of self-improvement courses into one of the most widely read American authors on the subject.
Before and after that book, the work was mostly instruction rather than authorship. He taught courses in public speaking, salesmanship, corporate training and self-improvement, and the writing grew out of that teaching. Other titles followed: *Lincoln the Unknown* in 1932, *How to Stop Worrying and Start Living* in 1948, and several more.
He was born in 1888 on a farm in Missouri, into poverty, in the town of Maryville, and died in 1955. The distance between that start and the readership he eventually had is part of why the material still gets quoted — he was writing about advancement as someone who had made the climb himself.
Before and after that book, the work was mostly instruction rather than authorship. He taught courses in public speaking, salesmanship, corporate training and self-improvement, and the writing grew out of that teaching. Other titles followed: *Lincoln the Unknown* in 1932, *How to Stop Worrying and Start Living* in 1948, and several more.
He was born in 1888 on a farm in Missouri, into poverty, in the town of Maryville, and died in 1955. The distance between that start and the readership he eventually had is part of why the material still gets quoted — he was writing about advancement as someone who had made the climb himself.
Quotes 4
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying.”
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
“You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged.”
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
