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

"Made in America" examines self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective. This text discusses the emergence of self-starters in relation to the changing consumer markets of the 20th century, and 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?; and if it lives on, what form has it taken? This text aims to uncover the richness, complexity, and diversity of self-styled success in America. By bringing gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the "self-made man", it provides a reexamination of a traditional area of inquiry in American studies.