Selling and salesmanship pervade American life and literature: Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser), Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), The Iceman Cometh (Eugene O’Neill), Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller), and Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet). Trump, indeed, continues actively to extol a later Carnegie fan (Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking) for his contribution to the American way of life. In the depths of the Great Depression, it was this desperate need that Carnegie addressed in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Early on in his pitch for a mass audience, Carnegie mixed a simple American credo with radical European thought. From the outset, like Carnegie, Peale identifies squarely with the Common Man.

Source: The Guardian November 07, 2016 05:46 UTC