Born 5 July 1810 in Bethel, Connecticut, the eldest son of an innkeeper. From his earliest years Barnum had two convictions that never left him: that the public would pay handsomely to be entertained, and that there was no honour in deceiving them past the moment of the show. The combination made him one of the most controversial and one of the most successful figures of the nineteenth century.
In 1841 he bought Scudder's American Museum in New York and turned it into the most-visited attraction in the United States — a chaotic cathedral of curiosities, lectures, freak shows, dioramas, and theatrical performances that drew forty-one million paid admissions across two decades. He toured General Tom Thumb across Europe (twice meeting Queen Victoria) and brought the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to America in a marketing campaign so meticulously prepared that the term Lindomania entered the language before she had sung a note.
In his sixties he turned to politics — two terms in the Connecticut legislature, one term as mayor of Bridgeport — and to the writing of his autobiography, which went through more than thirty editions. He died in 1891. The Art of Money Getting, the lecture he gave more than a hundred times in his last decades, is the distilled folk wisdom of a man who watched fortunes made and lost in front of him for fifty years and decided to write down what actually worked.