Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey[1] on January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.[2] She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,[3] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,[4][5] and was for a time the world's only black billionaire.[6][7] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[8][9]
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.[10]Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,[6] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[11] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[11][12] thetabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[11] which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[13][14] By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas,[15] and an emotion-centered approach[16] she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to... [continues]

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