Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum

Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
437K words
Chapters
44

Tags

English Originals General Biography Entrepreneurial JourneyEntertainment IndustryLegendary LivesBusiness WizardsCircusInspirationSuccess MindsetSelf-Promotion19th CenturyAmerican Dream

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum by BarnumAuthor: Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891,Language: English, Class: GV: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation: Recreation, Leisure, Release Date: Oct 2, 2015

Editor's review

This is the four-decade memoir written by the circus mogul Barnum himself in his later years—both a personal story of struggle and a vivid slice of nineteenth-century American entertainment and popular culture. In the first person he recounts his journey from a poor boy to founding a museum and promoting traveling exhibitions, full of self-promoting humor and period detail, and valuable for understanding the rise of American commercial spirit, advertising, and mass entertainment. The prose is plain and story-driven, suitable for casual reading or as primary material for studying nineteenth-century American society and culture. The public-domain ebook is easy to search and excerpt, but note that the author's account is strongly self-flattering; read it with a critical eye.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and preface first to grasp the forty-year timeline, then dip into chapters of interest.
  2. Mark the author's self-praise as you read and weigh it against the historical context.
  3. Read alongside materials on nineteenth-century American society and culture for better understanding.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44

FAQ

Is this a complete autobiography or a selection? It is Barnum's own four-decade memoir, told in the first person in chronological order—a fairly complete personal recollection, not a biography assembled by others from selections.
How difficult is the original English? The prose is mostly plain narrative with uncomplicated sentences, though it includes nineteenth-century American social and business vocabulary. Readers with intermediate English can finish it with a dictionary.
Is the public-domain ebook suitable for research citations? It can serve as primary material, but public-domain ebooks usually lack scholarly notes and textual collation. Verify specific historical facts against other authoritative editions or sources.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891 Author

P. T. Barnum (Phineas Taylor Barnum, 1810–1891) was a well-known American showman, entrepreneur and popular writer. Public information about his life is limited, and three of his works are held in this collection, focusing on social criticism, personal recollection and practical money-making advice. In The Humbugs of the World he exposes frauds and pseudo-science in a humorous, sharp style; Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum is an autobiographical account of his business and entertainment career; and The Art of Money Getting sums up principles of wealth in short, aphoristic pieces. His plain, anecdotal writing combines instruction with entertainment and offers a useful glimpse into nineteenth-century American commercial culture and social psychology.