Article: Tropes and parodies of capitalist biography: Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" vs. Herrick's 'Memoirs.'.(Andrew Carnegie; Robert Herrick)

In the late 19th century, advocates of capitalism found biography an ideal genre for promoting the virtues of individualism. Focusing first on the way that Robert Herrick attempted to parody the form for satiric purposes, this essay then looks at the Christian rhetoric employed by Andrew Carnegie in his counter critique or "Gospel of Wealth."

The central cultural project of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Alan Trachtenberg argued in his wittily titled The Incorporation of America, was the expansion of commercial values into new social discourses. In order to legitimate the domination of the economy by corporate interests, it was necessary to educate ...

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