As Dale Carnegie’s daughter, I am thrilled to present this new edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. It has been a long-awaited chance to freshen it while still staying faithful to the original language and content. Although the book first came out in 1936, the information you’ll find contained within is neither obsolete nor irrelevant. The book has struck a chord for generation after generation and continues to do so with today’s audience. The title alone has become a household phrase, often quoted, paraphrased, and parodied, showing up in everything from political cartoons to novels.
It may seem surprising now but no one at the time of the book’s publication could have predicted the overwhelming response, least of all my father. As my mother, Dorothy Carnegie, described it in 1981, which is the only time the text of this classic has been touched:
How to Win Friends was first published in 1936 in an edition of only 5,000 copies. Neither Dale Carnegie nor the publishers, Simon & Schuster, anticipated more than this modest sale. To their amazement, the book became an overnight sensation and edition after edition rolled off the presses to keep up with the increasing public demand.
How to Win Friends took its place in publishing history as one of the all-time international best-sellers. It touched a nerve and filled a need that was more than a faddish phenomenon of post-Depression days, as evidenced by its continued and uninterrupted sales into the present day. It has been translated into almost every known written language. Each generation has discovered it anew and has found it relevant.
My mother wrote that more than forty years ago and it’s still true today.
How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold more than 30 million copies, is not just a paragon of its genre: It more or less invented it. It was the first of its kind. In 1936 there were no racks of self-improvement books like there are today. “Improving yourself” usually meant refining your table manners, or acquiring an appreciation for fine art and literature. You did not learn how to make friends from a book. You were either popular and successful or you weren’t.
Dale Carnegie sought to change that. He knew human relations could be taught. For years he had given classes in adult education. The most popular was the Carnegie Course, nominally a class in public speaking but encompassing much more: He believed that being able to speak before an audience gave people the confidence they lacked to get their ideas across effectively, and could open the door to transforming themselves into the person they aspired to be. My father found the work both challenging and satisfying. His business was taking off and keeping him busy, so it never occurred to him to write a book based on the class material until he was approached by Leon Shimkin.
In 1934, Shimkin, the brilliant up-and-coming editor at S&S, attended one of my father’s lectures and was intrigued enough to sign up for a Carnegie Course. He was so impressed by what he saw and heard during the first few sessions that he urged my father to write a book.
At first my father was reluctant to take time out from his classes for a project of that scope, but Shimkin persisted. He felt that there was a market for “the art of dealing with people,” and talked my father into putting together an outline based on recordings of his lectures. As he worked on the draft, my father began to see promise and committed to the project.
According to him, “I didn’t really write How to Win Friends. I collected it. I merely put on paper the lectures I had been giving to people to help equip them for business and social life, the success hints that they had been telling me.” He had no idea at the time that it would find a much wider audience than his classes.
By the mid-1930s the grip of the Great Depression was starting to ease. Although war was looming in Europe, in America people were beginning to look ahead to rebuild both the economy and their own lives. After the privations of the previous decade, the mood was now one of cautious optimism, and people wanted to realize their potential as they looked ahead to a better future. The time was ripe for a book like How to Win Friends.
When How to Win Friends hit the stands, it touched a nerve and the public responded, snatching up a quarter of a million copies in the first three months. Today it is still going strong, which tells us that the craving for connection to others and the need to grow is a part of the human psyche.
Which brings us to the logical question: Why revise a classic that has proven itself to have timeless value and which continues to have universal appeal? Why tamper with success?
Again, my mother said it best in 1981:
To answer that we must first realize that during his lifetime, my husband was a tireless reviser of his own work. He constantly refined and improved his courses to serve the evolving needs of an ever-growing public. If he had lived longer, he would have updated How to Win Friends himself to reflect the cultural shifts that have taken place in the world since it was first published.
In this new edition we have continued my father’s tradition of keeping his work timely for the next generation of readers without straying from the powerful authenticity of the original. My father wrote just as he spoke, in an intensely exuberant, conversational manner stemming from his rural Midwestern roots, and we didn’t want to change that. We have kept the breezy, brash Carnegie style—even the ’30s slang is still there—his voice encouraging his readers to make what are often sweeping changes in the way they relate to their families, coworkers, and community.
We have not “changed” How to Win Friends. This is only a touch-up, as we did not want to rewrite a classic or diminish the magic of my father’s voice.
We have eliminated some of the references to people or events that readers today would not recognize or that we felt were out of touch with today’s world, including some material that was added later on in the 1981 revision. We wanted to get back to the original as closely as possible, while simultaneously touching it up for tomorrow, so we started fresh and worked from the first 1936 edition, the undiluted source.
To say How to Win Friends is timeless is to undervalue its impact. Even those who have never read the book will recognize many of the ideas within. My father’s principles, so in tune with what people wanted and needed, were quickly embraced by the business leaders of the day. In today’s world, they are being presented as “cutting edge” strategies by Human Resources and corporate leadership programs. Professionals and laypeople alike have borrowed them, repackaged and rephrased them, with the promise of revealing how to increase your self-confidence, develop management skills, and improve your social life.
My father didn’t invent the concepts he wrote about, but he was a pioneer in the way he presented them. Many of our current be-your-best-self gurus owe their talking points and success to the foundation this book laid down nearly ninety years ago, and many of today’s popular books have been derived from the content in How to Win Friends. The overriding theme and the linchpin of this book is to see things from the point of view of others.
In our era of political strife and social upheaval, we need to learn human relations skills more than ever. These pages will show you how to have a civil conversation with those you disagree with, explain why others won’t “listen to reason,” and help you to mend rifts with family and friends when it seems beyond hope. It is not an easy assignment, but it is vitally important. Help, often life-transforming help, is here in these pages.
Such challenges were not easy for my father. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t the model of human relations that people imagined him to be. He struggled with these lessons as much as everyone else. He always kept a D.F.T. file, “Damn Fool Things I’ve Done,” to remind himself of his missteps: “Was introduced to 2 women today—forgot the name of one instantly.” When he got impatient with a clerk who ignored him: “I, who take money from people for telling them how to handle human nature, was as crude and ineffective as a caveman!” And “Wasted 20 minutes hating Tom G—— when I was supposed to be writing a book on self-discipline.”
There is a wonderful family story of when a friend of my mother’s dropped by to visit just after my parents had had an argument. My father was still fuming and stomping around the house. When the guest commented on it, my mother nodded toward him and said, “There goes the man who wrote the book.” As he often said, he wrote How to Win Friends for himself as much as for others.
This revision has been a labor of love for me. I was only four when my father passed away in 1955, but I remember him well. He was warm, laughed easily, loved people, and always made time for me. He was very much the person whose voice you hear in this book.
In working on this project, I was fortunate to have the invaluable help of writer Andrew Postman, and together we reviewed and analyzed every line of How to Win Friends and Influence People again and again, weeding out extraneous material and carefully debating the merits of any change we made, no matter how small. I am also grateful for the input of Stuart Roberts, our editor at S&S, whose support for this revision was unflagging, and Joe Hart and Christine Buscarino at Dale Carnegie Training for being sounding boards throughout the project. I believe my father would have been very pleased with the results. It is my hope that you will be, too, and that you not only benefit from the wisdom within but enjoy the journey as well.
Donna Dale Carnegie