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== Literature ==
* In the late 19th century, the [[Rags to Riches]] trope usually involved a poor yet clever and virtuous boy who rises to affluence due to hard work, and clean living (and phenomenal luck, but they won't tell you that). This trope was arguably the basis of Social Darwinism, but it died sometime during the forties Deal and no one can say why for certain. Presumably it had something to do with the immensity of the wall street crash (for if people got rich by hard work and clean living, did that mean all those that lost wealth were lazy and uncouth, along with unlucky?), the influence of the World War II experience (with Hitler's Germany being a horrific case of many of the tenets of Social Darwinism put into action), the New Deal (which made people question the idea of individuals purely responsible for their success) and the nascent civil rights movement (springing from demographics of people who had been denied success for the color of their skin, not from the content of their character.)
** [[Horatio Alger, Jr.]]'s work is the classic example. Alger's work shows a real Forgotten Trope, where the boy goes from dirt poor all the way up to... working class, with no thought about becoming really rich or upper class. ''That'' would have been utterly unrealistic back then. Today it reads like tales of a man's long and difficult struggle to reach the middle.
** The British equivalent is Dinah Craik's ''John Halifax, Gentleman'' and Samuel Smiles' ''Self-Help.''
** It refuses to die as long as [[Ayn Rand]] has disciples.
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