A Slate editor runs a very long article very much like dozens of other articles I’ve read over the years debunking the Myth of the Self-Made Man, complete with the usual examples such as Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie.

The Self-Made Man The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth. By John Swansburg

What’s more interesting is that John Swansburg Jr. makes fairly clear how much of his interest in denouncing the myth of the self-made man has to do with his relationship with John Swansburg Sr., a crude self-made man who presumably paid for Swansburg Jr.’s refined education:

By that time my father had left the roofing business. He had started his own roofing company in his mid-20s, turned it into a profitable concern, and cashed out so he could invest in more lucrative enterprises. My father has never had any vanity about what sort of business he’s in, so long as he sees “a return on my invested dollars,” a phrase he repeats, in his thick Boston accent, like a mantra. Over the course of my childhood he owned a paving company, a company that installed garage door openers, and, my favorite, a company that refurbished golf balls. He would pay a guy to fish shanked balls out of golf course water hazards, power-wash the muck out of the dimples, and sell the balls to driving ranges and country clubs at a nice profit. Mostly, though, my father made his money in real estate. Specifically, he bought and sold buildings he affectionately refers to as “pigs”: big, ugly industrial spaces. Buildings with saw-tooth roofs and wrinkle-tin sides. Buildings that housed sheet metal shops, produce-industry middle-men, discount-furniture-store distribution hubs. In his late 20s and early 30s, the years before he bought the Hilltop, he built a small empire in the hardscrabble ring around Boston: in Charlestown, Everett, the precincts of Cambridge that Harvard and MIT students studiously avoid, and in Chelsea, where his first roofing shop had been. I once asked my father how he knew when a pig was a good investment, since aesthetics, and even location, seemed not to factor into his calculus. “When I’m looking at a building,” he said, “I drive up to it. If my balls tingle, I buy it. Otherwise, I don’t.”

A general pattern down through history is that men who write professionally tend to be the sons of men who made enough money for them to go into this pleasant but poorly compensated trade.

And the fathers and sons tend to have a lot of issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPSzPGrazPo&feature=youtu.be

Thanks to Ziel for pointing out that Monty Python was parodying this almost 50 years ago.