The broke years are the best part of these biographies

Sam Walton lost his best store because he never negotiated a renewal option on the lease. His landlord in Newport, Arkansas, wanted the business for his own son. Walton was thirty-two, had built the most profitable variety store in his region, and the whole thing was handed to somebody else. He packed up and started over in Bentonville.

That's on the early pages of Made in America, and it's worth more than the chapters about billions. Most biographies of self-made men get read backward. People skip to the empire. They should read the broke years twice.

The success chapters are all the same. Money arrives, the man gets famous, a building gets his name. The early chapters are where you learn what he did on a Tuesday when nothing was working, and that's the part you can copy.

Start with the two you can get free

Three of the best are old enough to be in the public domain, so a library card or a free e-book gets you in without spending anything. Your library card is worth more than most people use, and this is a good place to start using it.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He was a printer's apprentice who ran out on his brother's shop in Boston at seventeen and landed in Philadelphia nearly broke. It's short, it's funny, and it's a better book than its reputation. Franklin keeps a running list of his own mistakes, which he calls errata. Read it for the habit of auditing yourself. It's unfinished, and it stops well before the famous part. Mild flag: he owns up to some youthful lapses, handled briefly and without detail.

Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington. About two hundred pages. Born enslaved, he worked as a janitor to pay his way through school, then built Tuskegee Institute starting in 1881 with almost no money and a borrowed building. The lesson is how he treats work. He took it as dignity, not as a punishment to be escaped. Flag: it describes slavery and its cruelties plainly. It's fine for a mature teenager, and better read together than alone.

Andrew Carnegie's autobiography is free too. He came from Scotland as a boy and started as a bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton mill at $1.20 a week. It reads well. But read it knowing it's the man's own account. He's the author, the editor and the hero. Pair it with a biography that doesn't owe him anything.

The one that proves failure is a prerequisite

Hershey, by Michael D'Antonio. Milton Hershey failed at candy more than once. His early ventures went under in several cities before caramels finally took off in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He sold that business for a million dollars in 1900 and used the money to start over in chocolate.

Then he and his wife, with no children of their own, put the fortune behind a school for orphan boys. If you want to see what a man does with success after he's had a few doors slammed on him, this is the book. It's also the cleanest on the list. Hand it to a fifteen-year-old without a second thought.

The one for the man who thinks it's too late

Grinding It Out, by Ray Kroc. Kroc was selling milkshake mixers when he walked into a drive-in in San Bernardino. He was fifty-two when he opened his first franchised McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois. That detail alone is worth the price of admission for any man who thinks his window has closed.

It's his own telling, and it's not generous to the brothers whose name he took. Read it for the stamina and the sales instincts, and treat the score-settling with suspicion. It's a salesman's memoir, so preview a chapter before you pass it to a teenager.

The long one, and how to read it

Titan, by Ron Chernow. This is a biography of John D. Rockefeller, and it's well over seven hundred pages. His father was a traveling huckster who was often gone and not always honest, and the family's troubles are handled soberly. At sixteen Rockefeller landed a bookkeeping job in Cleveland and started keeping his own ledger of every nickel.

Nobody has to read all of it in one run. Read the first third slowly. That's the ledger years, the first partnership and the first refinery, which are the heart of the story. After that, read at whatever speed holds your interest. The later chapters cover ruthless business tactics and the public backlash against them. That's history worth knowing, but it isn't a how-to.

Flag: Chernow doesn't flatter. You'll finish admiring the discipline and uneasy about some of the methods. That's the correct reaction.

Read them for the ledger, not the legend

Every one of these men kept count of something. Franklin tracked his faults. Rockefeller tracked pennies. Walton walked into competitors' stores with a notepad. None of them was a visionary on day one. They were stubborn and observant, and they kept at it.

So read with a pencil. Mark one habit per book, the thing the man did when nobody was watching. Then do it for a month. If it doesn't work, it cost you a month. If it does, you've borrowed from a man who already paid for the lesson.

How to build the habit with these

Don't start with Titan. Start with Franklin or Washington, because both are short enough to finish in a couple of weeks of evenings, and finishing one book is what builds the next. Then move to Hershey or Walton.

Your own library is the cheapest shelf you'll ever build. If you've got a boy in the house, read the short ones aloud and let him ask why Franklin ran away or why Washington swept floors. What to read aloud to your kids covers the younger end. For a wider list once you've worked through these, twenty books every man should read before forty is the next shelf up.

One last thing. Walton lost that lease in his early thirties, with a growing family and a business he'd poured himself into. He was in Bentonville the next year. The book doesn't dress it up, and neither should you. A man's biography gets interesting at the exact moment he has to start over.