He was born at home in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi in the midst of the Great Depression. In the eyes of his fans, Elvis didn’t simply live the American Dream he embodied it. Just as Lincoln, Alger, and Steinbeck offered different views into the very concept of the American Dream, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash participated in updating the story for the Rock and Roll era, rising from working class beginnings to become legends in American life and culture. The American Dream is an essential part of the national lore used to explain what it means to be a citizen of the United States. The story is everywhere: The well-known biography of Abraham Lincoln begins in a Kentucky log cabin and ends in the White House. Horatio Alger Jr.’s nineteenth-century novels depict characters rising from rags to riches, as achieved through honest work, courage, and perseverance. In the 1930s, novelist John Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men, in which the protagonists, migrant laborers George and Lennie, maintain their dream of owning a farm even as they face brutal poverty and economic disenfranchisement. The American Dream-the idea that every person who calls him or herself an American has the opportunity to achieve a better life, to find a voice within the structure of the “nation,” to rise-is a concept that deeply permeates our American identity.
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