Self-help Messiah

“An insightful and comprehensive new biography.” —The Economist

“[A] penetrating biography…Watts’s lucid prose and shrewd analysis gives us an absorbing portrait of Carnegie and the America he both reflected and shaped.” —Publisher’s Weekly(Starred Review)

“Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner, and now Dale Carnegie. Steven Watts is the Plutarch of American modernity.” —Robert Westbrook, author of John Dewey and American Democracy

“Self-Help Messiah is carefully researched and vigorously written, a pleasure to read and ponder. Don’t miss it!” —Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

“Steven Watts’s Self-Help Messiah is a fantastic page turner about the complicated pop guru of the American Positive Thinking Movement. Dale Carnegie was a master marketeer and common sense philosopher. This first rate biography does the legend justice. Highly recommended.” —Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite

“Compelling…Watts captures a momentous period of change in America and makes a forceful case for Carnegie’s significance in it.” —Barnes & Noble Reviews

[Steven Watts’s] descriptions…are poignant. Watts shows how particularly attuned Carnegie was to the psychological needs of Americans beaten down by the Great Depression, who needed to hear that positive thinking would garner positive results.” —NPR, Fresh Air

“A fascinating portrait of the father of self-help and incisive analysis of the mercurial era that produced him.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Watts…is an astute analyst of his subject’s life and times.” —Washington Post

“Watts captures a momentous period of change in America and makes a forceful case for Carnegie’s significance in it.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“A…fine new biography” —Harper’s

“[Watts] paints a fascinating picture of a man who ‘struggled to accommodate his yearning for affluence with a genuine respect for moral virtues’ and whose story ‘is, in essence, the story of America itself in a dynamic era of change.’” —City Journal

“[Self-Help Messiah] should be required reading for anyone concerned by the ongoing drift from what had been a republic of individual citizens downward into a class-defined social-nationalist state that would have appalled Kafka and Orwell…[Watts] does a masterful job of weaving in Carnegie’s impact on the lives of individuals being tossed by the waves of industrialization, urbanization and mass media that dominated the last century and this.” —Washington Times

“[Watts] weaves a very compelling and readable story about the human spirit and the psychological needs of a whole generation who were desperate to believe positive thinking and self-development would create a new and brighter future.” —Waterloo Region Record