Dale Carnegie

From a Missouri Farm to the Lecture Hall

Dale Carnegie was an American writer and teacher whose work grew out of the early twentieth-century world of public lectures, adult education, sales, and self-improvement. He was born Dale Carnagey on November 24, 1888, on a farm in Maryville, Missouri, the second son of farmers Amanda Elizabeth Harbison and James William Carnagey. He grew up around Bedison, Missouri, and attended rural one-room schools at Rose Hill and Harmony. In 1904, when he was 16, his family moved to a farm in Warrensburg. Carnegie later said he had to rise at 3 a.m. to feed pigs and milk cows before school, a detail that helps explain the practical tone that ran through much of his later work.

As a youth, Carnegie enjoyed public speaking and joined his school’s debate team. He became interested in the speeches at Chautauqua assemblies, a popular lecture and education movement of the time. After finishing high school in 1906, he attended the State Teachers College in Warrensburg and graduated in 1908. His first jobs after college were in sales: correspondence courses to ranchers, then bacon, soap, and lard for Armour & Company. He did well enough that his South Omaha, Nebraska, territory became the national leader for the firm.

In 1911, after saving $200, Carnegie quit sales to pursue his dream of becoming a Chautauqua lecturer. Instead, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and found little success as an actor. After a road show of Polly of the Circus ended, he returned to New York and lived at the YMCA on 125th Street. There he persuaded the YMCA manager to let him teach public speaking in return for 80% of the net proceeds. In his first class, he ran out of material and asked students to speak about “something that made them angry.” He found that this made them less afraid to address an audience. From that 1912 beginning, the Dale Carnegie Course developed.

Books, Teaching, and Influence

Carnegie’s name became closely tied to public speaking, salesmanship, corporate training, and interpersonal skills. By 1914, he was earning $500 a week, and by 1916 he conducted a sold-out lecture at Carnegie Hall. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army at Camp Upton. Some time later he changed the spelling of his last name from Carnagey to Carnegie, explaining that friends and correspondents often misspelled it and he did not want to keep correcting them. His early books included Art of Public Speaking (1915), with Joseph Berg Esenwein, and Public Speaking: a Practical Course for Business Men (1926), later issued under other titles.

He is best known for How to Win Friends and Influence People, published by Simon & Schuster in 1936. It was a bestseller from its debut and remained popular. By the time of Carnegie’s death, it had sold five million copies in 31 languages, and 450,000 people had graduated from his Dale Carnegie Institute. He also wrote Lincoln the Unknown (1932), Little Known Facts About Well Known People (1934), Five Minute Biographies (1937), and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948). One of his central ideas was that people can change others’ behavior by changing their own behavior toward them.

Carnegie married Dorothy Price Vanderpool, his former secretary, on November 5, 1944. She later ran the Carnegie company after his death. Dale Carnegie died of Hodgkin lymphoma on November 1, 1955, at his home in Forest Hills, New York, and was buried in the Belton cemetery in Cass County, Missouri. His words still resonate because they speak to common, daily problems: fear of speaking, worry, work relationships, and the wish to handle people better. His line, “Remember that 80% of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal with people,” sums up the plain force of his message.