letters between rosa parks and her husband and her mother, and you can see some of rosa parks' political writing, you can hear her voice talking about why she did what she did. is so i very much recommend them. >> host: is so you're spending a little more time at the library of congress. >> guest: absolutely, absolutely. >> host: jean theo harris, the rebellious life of mrs. rosa parks, is the name of the book. >> you're watching booktv, television for serious readers. watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> now joining us on booktv is steven watts. mr. watts, what do you do for a living? >> guest: well, i am a professor of history at the university of missouri. i teach cultural history, intellectual history. for many years. >> >> host: you're also an author. how do you pick some of the topics that you write about? >> guest: well, in my earlier career i published a couple of books on the era of thomas jefferson. it was quite by accident, i went to disneyland with my wife and nieces and nephews, and i got to thinking about walt disney, and it was one of those ideas that sort of stuck in my brain. it would not go away. i saw how many people were there, how much fun they were having, and i just began to think about disney and ended up putting together a book proposal writing a biography of walt diss nebraska is -- disney which was quite far afield of what i had done earlier. but to my shock, publishers were quite interested. and after the disney book, i got very interested in modern american culture and did a series of biographies after that. so as often in life, it was a matter of happenstance, i think. >> host: you've also written a book on hugh hefner. >> guest: well, i did. i followed disney with henry ford, and then after ford i did a biography of hugh hefner which was quite an interesting project in and of itself. >> host: what's the importance of a hugh hefner in american culture? >> guest: well, in the biographies i've done in the last now 20 years, what i've been exploring is modern consumer culture and a kind of ethic of self-fulfillment that i think lay behind that consumerism. and hugh hefner, i think about as much as anyone you could hope to make up, i think sort of in mid-century, mid 20th century america embodied the ethic of self-fulfillment with "playboy" magazine, his promotion of the sexual revolution, his lifestyle, so and so on forth. so i think he fit very, very well into the larger kind of project -- >> guest: well, we invited you here to talk about your most recent book, "self-help messiah." who is this we're looking at? >> guest: well, this is a biography, a kind of cultural biography of dale carnegie who was, i think by all accounts, the most popular and successful writer on success in 20th century america, best selling author, a figure who has had tremendous impact, i think, how we think about how to get ahead in life. >> host: when did he live, when was he influential? >> guest: well, carnegie was born in rural missouri in the 1880s, actually, late 19th century. very poverty-stricken, actually, farm family. his father was a terrible farmer. apparently, the worst farmer on record. every year his crops wouldn't come in, all of his animals died, he was just awful at it. and the family really suffered very badly. but they managed to put dale carnegie into school, very ambitious kid, and he sort of rose through the ranks over the next several decades. and it was in the 1930s when he really hit with his big book and began to make huge marks on american culture. >> host: well, who was dale carnegie before how to win friends and influence people came out? and what year did that book come out? >> guest: that book came out in 1936 at the very end of the year. before that, well, when carnegie from missouri sort of running against the grain of the old tradition of go west, young man, he went east, young man, and he went to new york. as a young, late teens, early 20s, determined to get ahead. and he was kind of a roust about for a while. meat salesman, car salesman, sales journalist, sales novelist. really didn't do very well at these things, and he finally fell back upon what had been his great talent in college, and that was public speaking. he had been very successful as a public speaker, and he began to teach public speaking. and that was his calling in life, it turned out. tremendously good at it. students began to flock to his courses on public speaking. they'd grow and grow through the teens and the 20s. and this is what began to put him on the map in terms of influence. >> host: was there a spiritual aspect to carnegie? >> guest: well, sort of yes and no. carnegie had been raised in a very traditional methodist family, very traditional protestantism. and as is often the case with adolescents, i think, he had revolted against that very hard. and his mother was kind of a lay creature, and he and his mother butted heads for strongly, and he sort of fled that tradition of traditional protestantism. but what's sort of interesting is i think the kind of fervor that his mother had really injected into him, i think, in a religious sense kind of flows into new channels, and i think that fervor, a kind of religious spirit if not theology really did kind of enter into what would become his great book, great best seller in the 19 1930s. >> host: steven watts, what was the impact of "how to win friends." >> guest: it was published in 1936, it was, to the shock of everybody involved, a tremendous hit. right from the beginning. leon shim ca, an acquisitions editor at simon & schuster, had taken the course and encouraged carnegie to put what he taught into a written form because he thought it would be a modest bestseller, perhaps sell a few thousand copies, everyone would make a little money and so on. but the book began to fly off the shelves within a couple of weeks of appearing. and within about six months, that book had sold half a million copies. within one year it had sold a million copies, and the trajectory was sort of off the charts from there. in sheer numbers, it has been estimated around the globe that book has sold in the present day somewhere around 35 million copies in various editions, and the impact was just tremendous. i mean, people gobbled it up and read it voraciously not only in this country, but increasingly abroad. >> host: what was his follow-up book, and did it do as well? >> guest: his follow-up book was in the 1940s where he was sort of dealing with postwar american society, and he wrote a kind of follow-up book on how to be happy in suburban america, basically x it was more orr -- and it was more oriented toward sort of dealing with the problems of prosperity with suburban folks who had sort of gotten in on the good life, but they still weren't happy with themselves. and it was a more sort of psychologically-oriented book. it did pretty well. it was the is second bestseller that year to dwight eisenhower's memoir of world war ii, but it was not nearly as good as how to win friends. >> host: if you said to somebody dale carnegie in 1946 in the u.s., would they know immediately who you were talking about? >> guest: i think they would have. he became a kind of household name, i think, in the late '30s and the 1940s. and then with his course which continued on through the '40s and through his death in the '50s, he was a person who got a lot of publicity around the country as a teacher. and i think what the book did that people responded to, what they remembered him for is carnegie reoriented the old traditional message of american success. benjamin franklin, horatio alger, all of those guys. the old message had been hard work, firm moral character, thrift. that was the road to success. what carnegie did, i think, was to touch a modern vein because he presented a message that was different. he still talked about hard work and all of that, but increasingly what he emphasized is that in a white collar world, in a bureaucratic world where more and more people were working in big businesses, in big schools, media, corporations, journalism and entertainment, what have you, you interacted with people constantly on a daily basis. teamwork was required, getting along with other people was required. and what "how to win friends and influence people" was all about was how to develop a personality as opposed to character. a personality that would allow you to get along with other people, a personality that would be attractive, a personality where you could sort of promote your own agenda but in a very subtle kind of way by making people like you. and that was sort of key to it. and for white collar workers in modern america, this worked. it worked well. and they gobbled it up, as i said, and it really became a kind of, i think, a foundation text for what lots of people have tried to do thereafter. >> host: what was his personal life like? life like? >> guest: yes. well, in many ways he was a kind of traditional midwesterner, and he never changed in that way. he was a bit reserved. he had a little bit of a twang to his voice. he was not himself a kind of -- [inaudible] , but he was a quiet, serious man. his personal life, he was a pastor for a good deal of his life. a bit of a ladies' man in his younger and middle age, and he married rather late. when he was in his 40s to a young woman he met through the dale carnegie -- >> host: that was dorothy? >> guest: dorothy. and she became his partner in the enterprise, and he ended up becoming a first-time father about the anal of 61 -- the age of 61 or something like that with dorothy. and he became a family man late in life. he was a regular guy in a lot of ways. >> host: who were the ofen bachs? >> guest: well, in the course of my research when i was in the carnegie archives, i came across a couple of letters. and as i read through them, they were from a woman named frieda, and they were letters that, shall we say, were romantic and sort of referred to a relationship. and and the archivist there, i asked her if she knew who frieda was, and she had no idea. showed her the letters, she said she'd never seen them. long story short, i played sherlock holmes because i found on the stationery for one of these letters the name offen bach at the top. so i got on one of these web sites for looking up ancestry, and i eventually found out that her name was frieda offenbach x. as i followed the trail a little bit, i discovered that, in fact, dale carnegie had a relationship with frieda offenbach for really most of his adult life from the late '30s up to his death. and she was married, unhappily, to a jewish gentleman who had studied to be a rabbi. you can't make this stuff up. but a gentleman who had gone blind. very unhappy marriage, and she met carnegie by accident. they ended up having a kind of romance. and there was a girl who was born of this romance that carnegie -- while the evidence is not 100% clear, it seems pretty clear to me and i think the evidence suggests that she was his daughter. >> host: this is linda. >> guest: linda. >> host: is she still alive? >> guest: it turned out that linda was still alive, and i chased her down in berkeley, california. turned out to be a lovely human being. that was rather -- i was rather nervous about this, and i wrote this very diplomatic letter or, you know, your mother frieda, did she have a friend named dale carnegie, on and on. she called me up a couple days later and said, well, yeah, i've been waiting for somebody to ask me about this for 25 years. i have a box full of letters of dale carnegie's, would you like to come see them? be this is a biographer's dream, of course. so i was on a flight to berkeley pretty quick, and she was enormously gracious. gave me a full set of interviews about the relationship from the inside. and showed me the letters. so i discovered that dale carnegie had a kind of secret life. but i should say as well that he supported the girl financially through her whole life, put her through college, put her in his will, etc., etc. so in that sense heft a kind of stand-up -- in that sense he was a kind of stand-up guy about it. he had a daughter by his marriage, none of the carnegie family knew anything about this, so i ended up having to tell them about it as well. rather nervously. but everyone involved was very adult, very gracious and now his daughter from his marriage and the daughter from the other relationship have become good friends, actually, and they visit t with one another. so it all turned out very well. it was a very interesting part of the project. >> host: did he have a relationship with norman vincent peale? >> guest: well, he did. when carnegie became famous and a success writer with how to win friends, he ran across peel in new york be, sort of intellectual circles, and they did become friends. as carnegie once noted, he said that he and peale were doing the same sort of things, they were working different sides of the street with carnegie doing the sec lahr version of this and peale offering a kind of religious version of positive thought, success and religion as a way to happiness. >> host: is there a contemporary to dale carnegie today? >> guest: well, what i argue in the end of the book and i think in many ways it's the most important consequence of carnegie's life is i think "how to win friends and influence people" became a kind of foundation text for a whole explosion of self-help gurus that we begin to see in the '60s and '70s and then even more i think powerfully thereafter. it includes people like peale, of course, i think in the religious field robert schuller is someone in that tradition. joyce brothers, dr. joyce brothers, deepak chopra, steven covey, m. scott peck. and i think perhaps most popularly in terms of american culture, oprah winfrey. and i think all of them in one way or another talk about how personality development, sort of therapeutic adjustment, human relations is really the key to getting ahead in modern life. and i think dale carnegie's the guy that started all of that. >> host: where are his papers kept? >> guest: well, there's a small archive at the dale carnegie institute, a sort of family company that still runs the educational enterprise. they have offices in new york, but the little arc