ABSTRACT
James V. Catano argues that 'two opposing sets self-made versus institutionally defined and masculine versus feminine provide the basic argumentative structure of the myth of the self-made man'. Men are autonomous and self-created, women are institutionally molded. The American male hero is very often an orphan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when a fully fledged mass culture emerged in America, the success story and the exemplary life of the self-made man were among the most salient patterns of formula fiction. The times of the Puritans, of Franklin, and Emerson were forever gone when industrialization heralded the era of big business: the Gilded Age Nevertheless one have to historicize and contextualize in order to acknowledge that cultural practices are always dynamic processes rather than static facts. Ideas and myths develop, shift, and transform in exchange with other practices in society.
