How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie built this book out of the business courses he had already been teaching since 1912, and it reads like a course: short, numbered principles, each followed by a story meant to prove it rather than an argument meant to justify it. Published in 1936, it sold 250,000 copies in its first three months and went through seventeen editions in the first year.

The advice is organized around specific, repeatable moves — don't criticize, don't condemn, don't complain; give honest and sincere appreciation; remember a person's name and use it; let the other person do most of the talking; admit your own mistakes quickly and emphatically before pointing out someone else's. It's a book about technique, stated as technique, and it doesn't apologize for that. The course Carnegie built the book from outlived him: Warren Buffett took the Dale Carnegie course at twenty and still displayed the diploma in his office decades later.

It lands for anyone who wants direct, practical rules for getting along with people rather than a theory of why people behave as they do — and 1936 is part of what it is; the examples and the manners are of their era, and the book has drawn criticism since it was new for teaching a kind of manufactured warmth. Sinclair Lewis described the method as smiling and pretending interest in people's hobbies specifically in order to get something out of them, and that objection has never fully gone away.