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Essay on Oprah Winfrey
Through the power of media, Oprah Winfrey has created an unparalleled connection with people around the world. As supervising producer and host of the top-rated, award-winning The Oprah Winfrey Show, she has entertained enlightened and uplifted millions of viewers for the past two decades. Her accomplishments as a television pioneer, producer, publisher, educator and philanthropist have established her as one of the most respected and admired public figures today.
Oprah Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954 and is one of the most successful entrepreneurs and television personalities in the United States. She is currently involved in many business ventures, but is most identified with her massively popular and eponymous talk show. She is currently ranked as the most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine, as well as the ninth most powerful woman in the world.
Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi to an extremely poor Baptist family — her unmarried teenage parents were a housemaid, Vernita Lee, and a soldier, Vernon Winfrey. Her birth certificate has Orpah after the Moabite woman in the Book of Ruth in the Bible, but family and neighbors transposed the R and the P when pronouncing and writing her name. Eventually, Oprah became the accepted name. Oprah had few toys growing up, including a doll made from a corncob. A talkative young girl, Oprah would interview and talk to the doll and crows sitting on the fence of her family's property, presaging her media career.
As a child living in extreme poverty Oprah was often taunted by other children, a nickname given to her was “Sack Girl” because of the hessian overalls she wore for a large part of her childhood, her mother made them from potato sacks to save money.
Winfrey began her career in media at age seventeen, by which time she had been living in a better quality of life in Tennessee with Vernon for a number of years....
