Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in rural Wise County, Virginia, into poverty, and worked as a journalist in his youth. The defining (and biographically contested) event of his career was a reported 1908 commission from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to spend decades interviewing the most successful industrialists of the era—Ford, Edison, Firestone, and others—in order to distill a universal “philosophy of success.” Whether or not the Carnegie meeting occurred as Hill described it (historians have raised serious doubts), it became the founding narrative of his life’s work and the marketing frame for everything he wrote.

Hill’s project culminated in The Law of Success (1928) and the far more influential Think and Grow Rich (1937), published in the depths of the Great Depression to enormous and lasting success. His intellectual contribution was to repackage New Thought metaphysics—desire, faith, autosuggestion—into the secular, masculine vocabulary of American business achievement, presenting success as a definite, learnable technology rather than luck or talent.

Despite a personal life marked by failed ventures and self-mythologizing, Hill became the archetypal success guru, and Think and Grow Rich remains one of the best-selling self-help books in history.