Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-19th century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.

Prologue, 1916 The First World's Salesmanship Congress Introduction The Science of Selling 1. Hawkers and Walkers The Independent Peddler 2. Selling Ulysses S. Grant The Art of the Canvasser 3. Forging a National Marketplace The Traveling Salesman 4. Fifty-Seven Varieties Sales Managers and Branded Goods 5. The Pyramid Plan John H. Patterson and the Pursuit of Efficiency 6. Salesology Psychologists, Economists, and Other Sales Experts 7. Instincts and Emotions Walter Dill Scott and the Bureau of Salesmanship Research 8. A Car for Her Selling Consumer Goods in the 1920s 9. Selling Salesmanship Public Relations and the Great Depression 10. Beyond Willy Loman American Salesmanship Today Appendix Illustration Credits Notes Index Acknowledgments

I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, well argued, and thoroughly researched. Salesmen, Friedman argues, helped distribute the products of America's increasingly bountiful manufacturing industries, invented new forms of managerial hierarchies, investigated the psychology of desire, and were in the vanguard of America's transformation from a producer to a consumer society. He powerfully shows that the rise of modern business practices and the emergence of a particularly American culture of consumption can only be fully understood if we examine the history of selling.

I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, well argued, and thoroughly researched. Salesmen, Friedman argues, helped distribute the products of America's increasingly bountiful manufacturing industries, invented new forms of managerial hierarchies, investigated the psychology of desire, and were in the vanguard of America's transformation from a producer to a consumer society. He powerfully shows that the rise of modern business practices and the emergence of a particularly American culture of consumption can only be fully understood if we examine the history of selling. -- Sven Beckert, author of The Monied Metropolis Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America is an important book. The modern industrial economy, created in the United States and Europe between the 1880s and the 1930s, required the integration of large-scale production and marketing. The evolution of mass production is a well-known story, but Friedman is the first to fill in the crucial marketing side of that industrial revolution. -- Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., author of The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope With wit and verve, Walter Friedman gives us a cast of memorable characters who turned salesmanship from ballyhoo to behaviorism, from silliness to science. Informed by prodigious research, Birth of a Salesman also clarifies the birth of modern marketing--from an angle that humanizes its subject through wry, ironic, but serious analysis. This is a pioneering work on a subject crucial to American social, cultural, and business history. -- Thomas K. McCraw, author of Creating Modern Capitalism