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Dale Carnegie Facts & Worksheets

Dale Carnegie was a highly acclaimed American writer, professor, and pioneer of salesmanship, public speaking & self-improvement.

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Dale Carnegie was a highly acclaimed American writer, professor, and pioneer of salesmanship, public speaking, self-improvement, and interactive skills courses in the United States and across the globe.

See the fact file below for more information on the Dale Carnegie or alternatively, you can download our 22-page Dale Carnegie worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

Humble Beginnings

  • The famed author and lecturer was born Dale Breckenridge Carnagey on November 24, 1888, in Maryville, Missouri to indigent farmworkers James William and Amanda Elizabeth Carnagey.
  • Growing up, Carnegie was not gifted with athletic skills, but learned that he could still make friends and earn people’s respect because he had a way with words.
  • When he was in high school, Carnegie liked attending Chautauqua assemblies, which went on tour across the country to bring entertainment to rural communities together with popular musicians and preachers.
  • Inspired by the speakers he heard at these events, Carnegie was urged to join his school debate team, where he prudently developed his oration skills.
  • After finishing high school in 1906, young Carnegie studied at the local State Teachers College in Warrensburg, Missouri. His family was too impoverished to afford the $1 lodging, so Carnegie continued to live at home while commuting to and from school daily on horseback. He took advantage of these solitary rides to rehearse speeches and to tweak his oratory techniques.
  • He also frequently joined intercollegiate public speaking tournaments, winning the majority in which he participated. His rhetoric mastery was so remarkable that other students offered to pay Carnegie to train them.

Early Career

  • After graduating from college in 1908, Carnegie got a job as a traveling salesman for the International Correspondence Schools, and was assigned to Alliance, Nebraska. He then took another sales job for the meatpacking business Armour and Company.
  • By 1911, he was able to save up $500, which was enough for him to quit his job, move to New York City, and try to make it as an actor.
  • Carnegie took brief classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then landed the lead role of Dr. Hartley in a touring production of Polly of the Circus. However, he did not like the experience and instantly decided that the thespian life was not for him.
  • He then enlisted in the U.S. Army where he served for a little over a year at Camp Upton on Long Island during World War I. After he was discharged from service, he took a job as a business manager of a roving lecture series led by writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas, best known for his coverage of Lawrence of Arabia.

Public Speaking Classes

  • After his short stint in showbusiness, Carnegie recalled how he was hired by students to train them in public speaking and later realized that this skill was what helped him succeed as a salesman.
  • He then made a proposal to conduct public speaking classes for adults at the YMCA, which had given him a venue to hold night classes in return for a share of the profits.
  • Carnegie’s classes on the everyday needs of business people were a big hit; he taught his students interviewing techniques, making persuasive presentations, and building positive relationships. Just within two years, the courses became so popular that Carnegie moved them from the YMCA and established his own Dale Carnegie Institute to accommodate more students.
  • In 1913, he published his first book, Public Speaking and Influencing Men of Business, which he used as reference for teaching his courses. Shortly after the book’s release, Carnegie changed his name from its original spelling (“Carnagey”), making people associate his classes and books with the storied Carnegie family, to whom he had no relation.
  • Over the next 20 years, Carnegie gradually polished his program to better cater to the needs of his growing professional audience. He emphasized that people who succeed in any given industry were not those with the technical capabilities, but rather those with the best people skills.
  • Carnegie believed that more than effective public speaking techniques, his students needed to learn social and communication strategies that distinguished leaders of all industries.
  • Realizing that no textbook on these crucial skills was written, he delved into reading hundreds of biographies to learn how the world’s greatest leaders achieved their success.
  • In 1936, after years of intense research, he came up with How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that struck a population hungry for self-improvement. Despite its modest initial publication of 5,000 copies, the book became an instant best-seller, selling nearly 5 million copies during his lifetime, while also being translated into every major language.

Carnegie’s Legacy

  • After the immense success of How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Dale Carnegie Institute became so popular that it was expanded to 750 cities all over the United States, as well as 15 countries overseas during his lifetime.
  • In 1953, Carnegie transferred the institute’s headquarters into a five-story brownstone warehouse in Manhattan. At the time of his death in 1955, it was approximated that 450,000 people had enrolled in his courses across the globe.
  • Dale Carnegie, while focusing on his programs, also wrote biographies, driven by his belief that the best way to learn the secrets of success was to read up on stories of the most successful people.
  • In 1932, he released Lincoln the Unknown, a biography on Abraham Lincoln, and later published several compilations of brief biographical sketches: Little Known Facts About Well-Known People in 1934, Five Minute Biographies in 1937, and Biographical Roundup in 1944.
  • In 1948, he was able to publish another best-selling book on self-improvement, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

Death

  • Dale Carnegie died on November 1, 1955 of Hodgkin’s disease at age 66. Since his death, the Dale Carnegie Institute has continued to grow and is at present a highly prestigious business training school operating in 90 countries.
  • A pioneer in the fields of professional education and self-improvement, Carnegie’s publications and programs inspired an entire generation of nonfiction writing. Despite an explosion of modern self-help books published over the recent years, How to win Friends and Influence People continues to be relevant and useful to professionals.
  • Although he had written countless pages of books and had given hours upon hours of talks, Carnegie’s essential message on how to live a successful life can be summed up by his two most fundamental maxims: “Forget yourself; do things for others” and “Cooperate with the inevitable”.

Dale Carnegie Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Dale Carnegie across 22 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Dale Carnegie worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about a Dale Carnegie who was a highly acclaimed American writer, professor, and pioneer of salesmanship, public speaking, self-improvement, and interactive skills courses in the United States and across the globe.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Who is Dale Carnegie?
  • Fast Facts
  • Carnegie Alumni
  • Dale Says
  • A Way With Words
  • A Cover Story
  • What A Year
  • Carnegie’s Contemporaries
  • What’s in a Name
  • Carnegie’s Protege

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Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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