Self Made Man / Literature

• Simona Ahrnstedt has two very straight examples, complete with the prejudice from the "old money": Seth Hammerstaal in "Överenskommelser" and Markus Järv in "Betvingade". And even Gabriel Gripklo in "De skandalösa", who was born as an aristocrat, had to make money on his own to save his family from actual bankruptcy.
• In Alien in a Small Town, Indira became this after she first left home in her youth, leaving a Mennonite farm, getting an education, and becoming a high-paid engineer on a Space Station. After her life falls apart, she returns home to the farm for many years... and then later goes back out into the world and achieves it all over again.
  Indira fascinated him. Here was this brilliant woman, totally self-made, professionally successful, with no biological enhancements at all. Raised Amish, for God’s sake. She entranced him, and yet the more time he spent with her, the more her very presence made him feel crapulous by comparison.
• In L. M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, Dr. Redfern.
• James T. Sedgwick, maternal uncle of the protagonist of Brewster's Millions, built his fortune in Montana, where he arrived with just a few thousands of dollars on his name and ended up owning some ranches and gold mines.
• In A Brother's Price, Jerin's grandmothers worked their way up from thieves to government spies, and were knighted for their part in winning the war. The Whistler family is very well-off at that point, partly thanks to the grandfather, who was a prince the grandmothers kidnapped. After his family lost the war and was executed, Prince Alannon saw no point in revealing his identity, and instead wrapped his kidnappers around his little finger. As a result, the Whistler offspring don't only have money, they also have good manners, and everyone, even the boys, is taught how to read and write. Grandpa insisted.
• Dancing Aztecs: While not explicitly stated, this is implied with Open Sports Committee member Bud Beemis, who has a good business, and carries himself very well, while Corella notes that "Some stink of the street still clung to him."
• Discworld has a few.
  • Harry King (AKA Piss Harry, The King of the Golden River) went from gutter-born mud lark to one of the richest men in the city by realising there is nothing so foul that someone doesn't want it — and what's more, you can usually get people who don't want it to pay you to take it away. While not liked, and even disrespected, by most of the traditional power players in the city, the protagonists and most other characters the reader is meant to sympathize with tend to have at least a grudgingly positive opinion of him.
  • Vimes is a peripheral example, in that the Watch ended up in its modern place of power because of his hard work, but in his personal life, he married way, way up. (He does have a general dislike/distrust of Aristocrats and others born into money, usually because they usually have personalities that lead them to treat others as inferior, at best. Vimes gets along with Sybil because she doesn't; one of their first meetings has him amazed that she even made friends with Nobby, who was described as "Disqualified from the Human Race for shoving.". Sybil herself is "More highly bred than a hilltop bakery.")
  • C.M.O.T. Dibbler is not an example, despite all his best efforts. But he never quite sinks under either and is already ready for the next Big Thing.
  • Mr. Bucket in Maskerade, whom Salzella contemptuously thinks of as "a self-made man who's proud of his handiwork".
  • Willie Hobson, of Hobson's Livery Stable, another businessman in the mold of Harry King who had 'found a niche, occupied it, then forced it open so wide a lot of money dropped in'.
• Karl Oskar of The Emigrants arrived in America with a wife, four children and a small chest with all their belongings, and by the end owns a large, prosperous farm which can support him and his now seven children. Karl Oskar firmly believes in self-improvement from hard labour, and left his homeland because he saw America as a place where his labour would be rewarded. However, it should be pointed out that the reason he chose to emigrate was the realization that hard work was useless without the opportunity to make it pay off, and that he could have worked himself to death in Sweden because there was no opportunity there.
• Mr. Weston of Emma. He and his first wife had a financially strained marriage as they overspent what his militia salary allowed for, forcing him to give up their son to her family when she died young. Mr. Weston then joined his brother's business, carefully building up a small but stable fortune that allowed him to buy a comfortable property. Unlike the Noveau Riche Eltons, Mr. Weston doesn't flaunt his wealth, simply enjoying its benefits in a friendly and gentlemanlike way.
• Alexandria's Character Arc in the Emperor books consists of becoming one of these; she starts off as a slave but manages to earn her freedom in the first book and goes on to become a successful jeweller.
• In Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey calls himself this, saying he started up his business and has made it as large and influential as it is now, all by himself. He seems to forget that it was Elena Lincoln who gave him the starting capital for his business.
• Fun Jungle:
  • J.J. is a former blue-collar kid who "somehow managed to parlay a couple hundred dollars he'd won in a poker game into enough money to make him the third richest man in America."
  • Tech billionaire Harper Weems from Tyrannosaurus Wrecks made her first fortune at the age of twenty-two by designing a website.
• The benefactor in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is a ringing example. From escaped convict to Wealthy Australian.
• Perhaps the most famous example in western canon is Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby. Born poor, he falls in love with a girl above his station and dedicates himself to making money to win her back. He's fantastically wealthy by the time the story starts and is famous for the lavish parties he constantly throws in his opulent mansion. Alas, his true love still rejects him.
• Wang Lung, the hard-working Chinese farmer from The Good Earth.
• Honor Harrington is a moderate example. Her parents were always well-off, a pair of respected and successful doctors who were themselves descended from successful professionals, but they were solidly in the yeoman social class and never had the money to really be "rich." Honor herself earned her first several million dollars with prize money from ships she seized for smuggling during her stationing in the Basilisk system, then reinvested the modest fortune into numerous investment opportunities around Manticore; the proceeds from her investments turned her from millionaire into a billionaire. She then founded Grayson Skydomes, Ltd. on the planet Grayson, bankrolled by her off-world fortune, the proceeds of which made her the wealthiest individual on Grayson and in shouting distance of the wealthy on Manticore. Throughout the novels, her fortune continued to expand through regular reinvestment in the many financial opportunities a sustained war provides anybody with capital and resources, along the way also earning a knighthood, a Duchy on Gryphon and investment as a Steadholder on Grayson. The later books have her as one of the most important figures, exonomically, politically and militarily, in the entire galaxy. However, all along the way Honor is quick to point out that her financial success is primarily the doing of her hired financial consultant, and she was always quick to deflect any praise or reward from her personal actions.
  • Klaus Hauptmann is another, albeit antagonistic, example and bears a hidden distaste for old money.
• The Hammer (2022): In his past life, Tiny clawed his way toward becoming the World's Best Warrior despite being born a penniless orphan through nothing but grit, talent, and a refusal to run away from a challenge. In his present life, he subverts this by trying to take advantage of everything he can to get stronger more quickly, from refining his Mana Body by eating on Lord Philes' dime to demanding tutelage and a weapon from Asgard.
• Hagbard Celine in The Illuminatus! Trilogy quit his job as a lawyer, sold his property, gave half of it to the poorest people he could find, and the other half to the richest people he could found, hitched a ride to Europe to start fresh. A few years later, he's the leading private importer of contraband after the mafia. Off course, it could all be a great big lie, he might not even exist.
• Rourke, from the In Death series, starts out as a poor Irish street brat and becomes an obscenely wealthy member of the Fiction500 through a combination of illegal and legal business ventures.
• Dr. Bledsoe in Invisible Man is almost a deconstruction of this type — he seems at first to have earned his way to the top honestly, but it becomes clear just how much he lied and schemed.
• Johann Sebastian Bach Smith from Robert A. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil is a rare protagonist example.
• Martin Dressler: Martin is the genuine article. He starts out as a hotel bellhop, and works his way up to clerk, to assistant to the hotel manager, to owner of a diner, to owner of a chain of diners, to owner of the hotel where he used to work, to a hotelier with hotels all over New York. However, since the book is a rather cynical take on the American dream, he loses everything and goes bankrupt.
• Exaggerated Trope in Paradise Lost; Mammon is so unwilling to owe anything to anyone that he refuses to be eternally happy in Heaven and instead goes to Hell to try fo find a power totally his own. He even lays out lavish plans to use this power to create an empire. Of course, all his power is derived from God and Beelzebub makes it clear his hope of making an empire in the universe's dungeon is delusional.
  "Let us not then pursue / By force impossible, by leave obtain'd / Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state / Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek / Our own good from our selves, and from our own / Live to our selves, though in this vast recess, / Free, and to none accountable, preferring / Hard liberty."
• Captain Frederick Wentworth of Jane Austen's Persuasion: "I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards." Those rewards amount to £25,000, making him equivalent to a millionaire. Sir Walter, on the other hand, objects to the navy precisely because it makes it possible for people like Captain Wentworth to enter the upper classes.
• Ayn Rand loves the trope and uses it as part of her belief in a true meritocracy where all the power, influence and wealth to go superlative people who earn it rather than the mediocre people who just want it to be given to them.
  • Atlas Shrugged: Hank Rearden, Midas Mulligan, Ken Dannagger, Ellis Wyatt, the posthumous Nat Taggart and Sebastian D'Anconia... the list goes on. Even Francisco D'Anconia, heir to the massive D'Anconia Copper empire, qualifies, as his family has a rule against assuming you're "born a D'Anconia" — you have to earn it. He started by working at a copper foundry in college and managed to earn enough money on his own to purchase the foundry himself, while still learning the family business.
  • Howard Roark from The Fountainhead.
• In Robert E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel", Conan brags that his Rags to Royalty climb was all his own and that he had shed blood himself as well as shedding that of others.
  • Conan is not kidding on that score either; he attained the throne of Aquilonia by leading a rebellion against its last king, a Caligula by the name of Numedides, who he personally slew by his own hand.
  • In "Queen of the Black Coast", Pirate Girl Bêlit is already a legend of the high seas, a feared pirate and the titular queen, with her crew treating her less like a leader and more like a goddess, before she ever meets Conan, putting her on equal footing with Cimmerian.
• Subverted by Akira in Rebuild World. To an outside viewer, Akira is a gifted prodigy who clawed his way up from being a slum rat to a hunter making massive amounts of cash. In truth, Akira is extremely reliant on Alpha in most situations and knows he's indebted to her for helping him survive one crisis after the other. While he does try to make it on his own merits, his bad luck throws him headlong into situations he can't handle on his own.
  • In "The Shadow Kingdom", Kull.
• Sir Willoughby Parfitt in ''Sharpe's Justice''.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish was born an extremely minor noble, heir to a crumbling tower on a tiny plot of worthless land, but has parlayed his genius with finances and intrigue into becoming the Master of Coin by the start of the story. He reaches loftier titles as the story goes on.
  • Varys and Illyrio began life as a mutilated thief and a street bravo, respectively. They parlayed their skills into becoming Master of Whispers and a Magister of Pentos. By the start of the story, they're two of the most powerful chessmasters in the world.
  • Bronn starts out as an anonymous bastard sellsword who earns a knighthood for his service during the Battle of the Blackwater and uses that to marry into a minor noble house.
  • In the backstory, the progenitor of House Clegane was a common kennelmaster who was granted a landed knighthood for service to his lord.
  • Davos Seaworth was a common smuggler who earned a knighthood by smuggling food into Storm's End during a siege, saving the city and earning himself the nickname "the Onion Knight." He quickly became Lord Stannis Baratheon's most trusted adviser, and ultimately his Hand of the King.
  • Members of the Night's Watch forsake all titles and inheritances, so commoners often rise to prominent positions. However, members from noble families still enjoy many advantages.
• Jason Currie of The Stone Angel never misses an opportunity to tell his children how he is this.
• The Stormlight Archive: Jasnah is a pretty straight aversion of Never a Self-Made Woman. She's the sister to a king but insists that she'd be able to exert the same authority if she merely convinced people she was royal. While she's never shy about using her wealth and connections, she's far more likely to use her own intelligence and natural charisma. She even refuses to marry in a world where both men and women are expected to pair off by their mid-twenties; she scoffs at the idea that she'd need a man for anything (and her demonstration with some muggers proves that she definitely doesn't need a man for protection). Her mother wryly claims that Jasnah has been a sour-faced scholar since she was five years old, and never needed even a mother.
• Well before the time of The Thrawn Trilogy, Thrawn had made Grand Admiral despite literally being an alien who had been picked up off of a distant planet. He'd been a Commander among his people but had been exiled to an unpopulated world. The Empire was quite biased against nonhumans and he started with no rank among them, but he was a strategic and tactical genius the likes of which the galaxy had rarely if ever seen, so despite his many oddities he was able to pull himself up into a position that let him command the Empire itself, in that trilogy.
• Tom Broadbent of Tyrannosaur Canyon aspires to be one of these. Born to a wealthy merchant family, he turned his back on his connections and started his own business as a veterinarian. While he has over $100 million inheritance, he never actually touches it since he values eking a living from his own labor.
• Military thriller Victoria has Terry, the former Marine aviator and aviation buff who made a fortune in real estate and fulfilled his dream — buying and restoring a real-life World War II jet bomber. Naturally, this becomes a plot point...
• Kya from Where the Crawdads Sing is a Minor Living Alone whose family abandoned her in a shack in a North Carolina marsh. She only attends one day of school and doesn't learn to read until she's a teenager. After Tate finally teaches her to read, she becomes a voracious reader of biology textbooks, not caring that they're too advanced for her. Her reading combined with her careful observation of the natural world makes her more educated than most of the townspeople by her early twenties, even though most of them see her as a feral idiot. On Tate's advice, she submits her work to a publisher, which helps her compile it into the most detailed guidebooks of East Coast shells and seabirds that currently exist. The royalty checks allow her to live comfortably and pay off back taxes on the land to save it from developers.
• Wolf Hall portrays Thomas Cromwell as this (although as his career unfolds, certain people have reason to see him go From Nobody to Nightmare). He starts as an abused blacksmith's boy, becomes a mercenary in Europe and finds his way to an Italian banker after an especially nasty battle. He begins by scrubbing the floor before getting into the counting house, then enters the wool trade, returns to England and becomes the Hypercompetent Sidekick of an aging merchant (who sets Cromwell up with his daughter), enters the legal profession, and becomes the right-hand man of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. After Wolsey's fall, Cromwell joins Henry's privy council and eventually takes the position of Master Secretary, which gives him enormous latitude and power — all the way along he's building substantial wealth. This being Tudor England, his origins are frequently hurled in his face as an insult regardless of the ability he shows.
• Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. After feeling betrayed by Cathy and leaving the Heights as a teenager, the gypsy foundling returns... somewhat mysteriously wealthy three years later. He then proceeds to swindle both Hindley and Edgar out of their respective properties.