Self-made man

A self-made man, is a person whose success is of their own making.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, has been described as the greatest exemplar of the self-made man.[1][2] Inspired by Franklin's autobiography, Frederick Douglass developed the concept of the self-made man in a series of lectures that spanned decades starting in 1879.

Originally, the term referred to an individual who arises from a poor or otherwise disadvantaged background to eminence in financial, political or other areas by nurturing qualities, such as perseverance and hard work, as opposed to achieving these goals through inherited fortune, family connections, or other privileges. By the mid-1950s, success in the United States generally implied "business success".

In the 2022 Princeton University book, The Roots of American Individualism, the author criticizes the concept of 'self-made' in American society as ignoring the role of social structures, privilege, and luck in shaping individual outcomes.[3]

  1. ^ Pine, Frank Woodworth, ed. (1916). "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin". Illustrated by E. Boyd Smith. Henry Holt and Company via Gutenberg Press.
  2. ^ Swansburg, John (September 29, 2014). "The Self-Made Man: The story of America's most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth". Slate. Retrieved November 12, 2017.
  3. ^ Zakaras, Alex (2022-11-10). The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-22631-6. Retrieved 2024-04-28.

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