Dale Carnegie

DALE CARNEGIE was born in Maryville, Missouri on 24 November 1888. He attended the State Teacher’s College in Warrensburg and served in the United States Army during World War I. Before beginning a long career in writing about self-improvement, salesmanship, and interpersonal skills, along with material for corporate training programmes, he was a teacher of public speaking. He taught night classes at a YMCA in New York where his classes became wildly popular and highly attended. In 1936, he issued a self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People to be used as a textbook for his courses in effective speaking and human relations. It touched a nerve and filled a human need that was more than a faddish phenomenon of the Great Depression after the war. By the time of his death, the book had sold five million copies in 31 languages, making it one of the bestselling books of all time.