Title: The American Dream - Dictionary.com
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Content: We can also locate the spirit of the American Dream in seminal studies of the American experience, like Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America, where he describes “the charm of anticipated success.” The specific phrase, however, emerges in the early 20th century. One of the earliest instances, in David Graham Phillips’s 1910s novel Susan Lenox, characterizes fashion and home magazines as promising a “rise of fortune” that is “the universal American dream and hope.” A 1916 article in The Chicago Tribune also speaks of fighting for “the American idea, the American hope, the American dream…”. It was historian James Truslow Adams, however, who cemented the concept and phrase: The American Dream. In the preface to his book The Epic of America, Adams wrote of “the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The instant popularity of the term The American Dream may well be attributed in no small way to the timing of its coinage—in the midst of the Great Depression, his phrase that encapsulated the vision that anyone could rise above adverse circumstances through dedication was a hopeful note. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech alludes to The American Dream with respect to racial inequality in the US, joining the literature of The American dream that helped define the nation. Examples of The American Dream
The ‘American dream’ is increasingly out of reach, as social mobility declines and fewer children face a better future than their parents.