Tom Butler Bowdon – 50 Self Help Classics

The self-help book was one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. The exact number purchased is impossible to calculate, but this selection of 50 classics alone has sold over 150 million copies between them, and if we consider the thousands of other titles the final number would run to more than half a billion. The idea of self-help is nothing new, but only in the twentieth century did it become a mass phenomenon. Books like How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) were bought by ordinary people desperate to make something of their lives and willing to believe that the secrets of success could be found in a paperback. Maybe the genre took on its lowbrow image because the books were so readily available, promised so much, and contained ideas that you were unlikely to hear from a professor or a minister. Whatever the image, people obviously had a new source of life guidance and they loved it. For once, we were not being told what we couldn’t do but only that we should shoot for the stars.

A self-help book can be your best friend and champion, expressing a faith in your essential greatness and beauty that is sometimes hard to get from another person. Because of its emphasis on following your star and believing that your thoughts can remake your world, a better name for self-help writing might be the “literature of possibility.” Many people are amazed that the self-help sections in bookstores are so huge. For the rest of us there is no mystery: Whatever recognizes our right to dream, then shows us how to make the dream a reality, is powerful and valuable.

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