A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.”

Excerpts, Interviews and Reviews