Her current life as a super-rich woman and one of the most loved and successful television personalities of all time is a very far cry from how Oprah Winfrey started her life in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Winfrey was born to a single teenage mother, raised by her grandmother, and once so poor that she was sent to school in a potato sack because she didn't have any clothes. Her rise from those humble beginnings is the very embodiment of the American dream.
Oprah has spoken often of how much she valued the care of her grandmother in Mississippi, but it was when she moved to Nashville with her biological father than she began to believe in herself. She entered - and won - the Miss Black Tennessee pageant when she was 17, and won a job on a radio station thanks to her local fame. A few years later, she was on TV, and now she sits at the head of her own network.