Who is the greatest self-made American?
No inheritance, no connections, no head start worth mentioning. Every one of them built it.
1Benjamin Franklin
Tenth son of a candlemaker, apprenticed at twelve, and the man who wrote the template for the American success story.
2Abraham Lincoln
Born in a Kentucky log cabin with about a year of formal schooling in total.
3Oprah Winfrey
Raised in rural Mississippi poverty and built a media company from a talk show.
4Andrew Carnegie
Arrived from Scotland at thirteen, worked in a cotton mill, then built the steel industry.
5Madam C.J. Walker
Daughter of enslaved parents who built a hair-care business and became a self-made millionaire.
6John D. Rockefeller
Bookkeeper's clerk at sixteen who assembled Standard Oil out of a single refinery.
7Frederick Douglass
Taught himself to read while enslaved and became the country's foremost orator.
8Henry Ford
Farm boy and machine-shop apprentice who put the country on wheels.
9Walt Disney
Went bankrupt in Kansas City before building the studio and the parks.
10Steve Jobs
Adopted son of a machinist who dropped out of college and co-founded Apple in a garage.
11Booker T. Washington
Born into slavery, walked hundreds of miles to school, and founded Tuskegee.
12Sam Walton
Ran one variety store in Arkansas before turning it into the largest retailer on earth.
13Dolly Parton
One of twelve children in a one-room Tennessee cabin, now a songwriting institution.
14Thomas Edison
Newspaper boy on the railroad with three months of school who ended up with over a thousand patents.
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