Napoleon Hill

Oliver Napoleon Hill was born in a one-room cabin in Wise County, Virginia in 1883 and worked as a reporter for a small magazine as a young man before becoming the author whose formula almost all subsequent success literature follows.

His account of his own origin is that Andrew Carnegie, in 1908, gave him a twenty-year unpaid commission to interview the most successful men in America and codify their methods. That story is the foundation of his authority and there is no documentary evidence for it.

Researchers have found no record of the meeting, no correspondence, and nothing in Carnegie's extensive papers, and several of Hill's other biographical claims have not survived examination. Biographers have also documented business ventures that ended badly for the people involved.

The Law of Success appeared in 1928 as a multi-volume work. Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 by the Ralston Society, condensed it into thirteen principles and has sold in the tens of millions across almost ninety years.

The principles range from the defensible to the frankly occult, and the book does not signal the transition. Definiteness of purpose, which requires a specific written aim with a named price, a deadline, and immediate action, is sound and is the reason the book still gets recommended. The Master Mind, meaning a deliberate group meeting regularly in harmony around a shared purpose, is now standard advice under other names.

The later chapters on sex transmutation and on the sixth sense, in which he describes an imaginary council of historical figures he convened in his mind and reports became real to him, are of their period.

He founded the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which continues to publish under his name. He died in 1970.