author
Self-made man
1853–1915
A house name rather than a clearly identified individual, this author credit appeared on many early 20th-century boys' adventure and success stories. The name is closely tied to lively dime-novel tales about hustle, money-making, and lucky breaks.
5 Audiobooks
A Copper Harvest; or, The Boys who Worked a Deserted Mine
by Self-made man
A Lucky Deal; or The 'Cutest Boy in Wall Street
by Self-made man
Born to Good Luck; or The Boy Who Succeeded.
by Self-made man
Dick Darling's Money; or, The Rise of an Office Boy; and Other Stories
by Self-made man, Various Authors
A corner in corn; or, How a Chicago boy did the trick
by Self-made man
About the author
"Self-made man" appears to have been a pseudonymous or house-author credit used for stories in Fame and Fortune Weekly, a long-running American series about boys who make money and seize opportunity. Project Gutenberg and dime-novel bibliographies list many works under this name, including stories such as A Corner in Corn and A Copper Harvest.
Reliable sources I found do not clearly identify the real person behind the credit. One source on Fame and Fortune Weekly notes that writer J. Perkins Tracy has been credited with hundreds of issues, while the published magazine itself presented the stories as being by "A Self-Made Man." Because the attribution is uncertain, it is safest to treat this as a publishing persona rather than a fully documented individual author biography.
The stories associated with this name were written to be fast, upbeat, and aspirational, offering young readers tales of ambition, business schemes, and hard-won success. That makes the name less a personal signature than a promise of a certain kind of story: energetic fiction about making one's own way in the world.