ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of self-help publications. American culture and literature was formed on this bedrock of philosophies concerning self-help, self-reliance and the formation of new social structures requiring new social structures. Success literature generated by the changes in Western culture altered again with the period of rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century. Improvement manuals based on Christian ethics were replaced by self-help books that discussed success in terms of the marketplace, influenced by ideas of evolutionary progress based on Darwinian discoveries. The appearance of such self-help literature during the Depression is perhaps unsurprising to us in an era of what sociologist Frank Furedi has called 'therapy culture'. The popularity of self-help books is sustained by an apparently apolitical, a historical neutrality, seeming to appear subconsciously to fill the gaps left by misdirected political and social policies. With the market primed, self-help transformed alongside further developments in psychology.
