How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published in 1937 in an edition of only five thousand copies. Neither Dale Carnegie nor the publishers, Simon and Schuster, anticipated more than this modest sale. To their amazement, the book becomes an overnight sensation, and edition after edition rolled off the presses to keep up with the increasing public demand. How to Win Friends and Influence People took its place in publishing history as one of the all-time international bestsellers. It touched a never and filled a human need that was more than a faddish phenomenon of post-Depression days, as evidence by its continued and uninterrupted sales into the eighties, almost half a century later.

Dale Carnegie used to say that it was easier to make a million dollars than to put a phrase into the English language. How to Win Friends and Influence People became such a phrase, quoted, paraphrased, parodied, used in innumerable contexts from political cartoon to novels. The book itself was translated into almost every known written language. Each generation has discovered it anew and has found it relevant.