Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883�November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. His most famous work, "Think and Grow Rich", is one of the best-selling books of all time.

According to his official biographer, Hill was born into poverty in a two-room cabin in the town of Pound in rural Wise County, Virginia. His mother died when he was ten years old. His father remarried two years later.

At the age of thirteen he began writing as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers. He used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons. The turning point in his career is considered to have been in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was one of the richest men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie commissioned him (without pay and only offering to provide him with letters of reference) to interview over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie. The formula for rags-to-riches success that Hill and Carnegie formulated was published initially in 1928 in his book "The Law of Success". The formula was later published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume "Mental Dynamite" series until 1941.

From 1919 to 1920 Hill was the editor and publisher of "Hill's Golden Rule" magazine. In 1930 he published The Ladder to Success. From 1933 to 1936 Hill was an unpaid advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1937 Hill elaborated his success formula in his most famous work, "Think and Grow Rich", which is still in print, in several versions, and has sold more than thirty-million copies. In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book, which for years was the only one generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published "Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised", which restored the book to its original form, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained. (The Cornwell-Hill "collaboration" resulted from the former's service as editor-in-chief of "Think & Grow Rich Newsletter," published for the Napoleon Hill Foundation.)

In 1939 Hill published "How to Sell Your Way through Life", and in 1953 How to Raise Your Own Salary. From 1952 to 1962 he worked with W. Clement Stone of the Combined Insurance Company of America to teach Stone's "Philosophy of Personal Achievement", and to lecture on the "Science of Success". Partly as a result of his work with Stone, in 1960 he published Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. He died in 1970 in South Carolina, and in 1971 his final work, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, was published posthumously.