Oprah Winfrey: The American Dream

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Although Oprah Winfrey struggled with familial issues and sexual assault as a young woman, her successful talk-show and theatrical achievements exemplified her American Dream. She has used her success to find contentment in her life and help inspire others by donating large amounts of her wealth to charities. Oprah Winfrey is a prime example of the American Dream, because she represents all facets of the American Dream. According to the dictionary, the AMerican Dream is “a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S.” (“Definition of The American Dream.”).Winfrey has become wildly successful through hard work, determination, and hope, the three things that America is so famous for being …show more content…
As she was born to a teenaged, unwed mother, she grew up in a single parent household for most of her life. She was also frequently sexually abused by male family members and was raped when 13 (“Oprah Winfrey Biography 2”) . To add to her troubles, at 14 she had a child who died shortly after birth. These, and other struggles helped to mature at a much faster rate than most of her peers. Although there were many hardships in her childhood, she pushed through it, and moved in with her strict father who helped to give her more structure in her life and motivated her to do well in school.(“Oprah Winfrey Biography”1)This lead to her becoming an honors student and eventually going on to college. While still in college, she got a job on a late-night talk show where she gradually built up to becoming the most watched talk-show in America. They later re-named her show to ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ and she became a household name all over the world. She later developed a tv-network called OWN or “The Oprah Winfrey Network”. These major successes lead to her achieving the American Dream, because she was on the way to becoming happy, financially secure and having a solid family life. She later said, looking back on her childhood, “I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who, from an early age, knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.”(“Oprah Winfrey”). Her successes were never hindered by situations she was born into, as she overcame many of the obstacles in her early life and used those hardships to propel her into a life of
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