Made In America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey - Softcover

Decker, Jeffrey Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816630216 ISBN 13: 9780816630219

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1997

Synopsis

The first look at self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective.

Brings gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the “self-made man.”

Made in America presents the first look at self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective. Jeffrey Louis Decker discusses the emergence of self-starters like Andrew Carnegie, Booker T. Washington, Madam C. J. Walker, Younghill Kang, and Lee Iacocca in relation to the changing consumer markets of the twentieth century.

Decker locates the new breed of entrepreneurs within the changing rhetoric of personal success, which shifted its emphasis over the past century from religious “character” to psychological “personality” to celebrity “image.” The book concludes by surveying the life stories of enterprising celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Decker analyzes the autobiographical expressions of famous entrepreneurs, from Carnegie to Ross Perot, alongside more marginal ones in order to examine how mainstream society shapes and is shaped by the cultures of subordinate groups. In addition, he looks at the link between self-making and nation-building, and in doing so discovers the origins of another pervasive myth: the “American dream.”

Underlying Decker’s study are these questions: What happened to the myth of self-making in America? If it is dead, what caused its demise? If it lives on, what form has it taken? Written in a lucid and engaging style, Made in America uncovers the richness, complexity, and diversity of self-styled success in our time. By bringing gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the “self-made man,” this book provides a timely and fascinating reexamination of a traditional area of inquiry in American cultural studies.

200 pages

Translation rights: University of Minnesota Press

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey Louis Decker was an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University, and currently teaches American studies and American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816630216
• ISBN 13: 9780816630219
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208