The American Dream Today

The term “American Dream” was first used by James Truslow Adams in 1931 in his book The Epic of America. There he described it as “a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” But I’ve discovered that like many things in life, definitions change. A more current description of the American Dream is “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity.”

I asked my blog readers for their own perspective on the term and got dozens of responses, such as this…