Dale Carnegie Before How to Win Friends: Lard Sales and a YMCA Class

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Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 on a poor Missouri farm and rose at 3 a.m. to milk cows and slop pigs before school. Traveling Chautauqua lectures inspired him, and after graduating from the State Teachers College in Warrensburg in 1908 he sold correspondence courses and then bacon, soap and lard for Armour and Company, building his South Omaha territory into the firm's national leader. In 1911 he took $200 in savings to New York, failed as an actor after playing Dr. Hartley in Polly of the Circus, and ended up broke at the YMCA on 125th Street, where he talked the manager into letting him teach public speaking for 80 percent of the net profits.

In 1912, out of material during his first class, he told terrified students to speak about something that made them angry, and their stage fright vanished. By 1914 he was earning $500 a week, and in 1916 he sold out Carnegie Hall. Around 1922 he changed the spelling of his name from Carnagey to Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People, published by Simon and Schuster in 1936, sold five million copies in 31 languages in his lifetime. He died of Hodgkin's lymphoma on November 1, 1955, and his second wife, Dorothy, expanded his institute worldwide.

• His World War I draft card shows he applied for conscientious objector status and was missing a forefinger; he served at Camp Upton.
• He kept the stress on the first syllable of his name, unlike the pronunciation of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
• Carnegie said he had critiqued more than 150,000 speeches in his adult education classes.
• His first marriage, to Lolita Baucaire, ended in divorce in 1931, and in 1944 he married his former secretary, Dorothy Price Vanderpool.
• By his death the institute had 450,000 graduates, and Dorothy later published The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking in 1962.