Napoleon Hill

Oliver Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American self-help author and con man who is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937), which is among the best-selling self-help books of all time. Hill's works insisted that fervid expectations are essential to improving one's life. Most of his books are promoted as expounding principles to achieve "success".

Hill is a controversial figure. Having had a history of criminal charges and fraud accusations, historians also doubt many of his claims, such as that he met Andrew Carnegie and that he was an attorney.

Hill was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound in southwest Virginia. His parents were James Monroe Hill and Sarah Sylvania (Blair), and he was the grandson of James Madison Hill and Elizabeth (Jones). His grandfather came to the United States from England and settled in southwestern Virginia in 1847. His father was a dentist, at first unofficially and then with a license.

Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later to Martha. According to Landers and Ritt, his stepmother was a good influence for him: "Hill's stepmother, the widow of a school principal, civilized the wild-child, Napoleon, making him go to school and attend church." At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter", initially for his father's newspaper. At the age of fifteen, he married a local girl who had accused him of fathering her child; the girl later recanted the claim, and the marriage was annulled.

At the age of seventeen, Hill graduated from high school and moved to Tazewell, Virginia, to attend business school. In 1901, Hill accepted a job working for the lawyer Rufus A. Ayers, a coal magnate and former Virginia attorney general. Author Richard Lingeman wrote that Hill received this job after arranging to keep confidential the death of a black bellhop whom the previous manager of the mine had accidentally shot while drunk.

Hill left his coal mine management job soon afterward and enrolled in law school before withdrawing owing to a lack of funds. Later in life, Hill would use the title of "Attorney of Law", although Hill's official biography notes that "there is no record of his having actually performed legal services for anyone."

In 1903, Hill married for the second time to Edith Whitman; in 1905 their child Edith Whitman Hill was born. Their marriage was a fraught one due to Hill's alleged abuse of his wife and daughter in addition to his infidelity.

During 1928, Hill relocated to Philadelphia and persuaded a Connecticut-based publisher to publish his eight-volume work The Law of Success (1925). The book was Hill's first major success, allowing Hill to adopt an opulent lifestyle. By 1929, he had already bought a Rolls-Royce and a 600-acre (240-hectare) property in the Catskill Mountains, with the aid of some lenders.

The beginning of the Great Depression, however, affected Hill's finances adversely, forcing his Catskills property into foreclosure before the end of 1929. He went broke, forcing his wife's family to pay for the expenses of Florence and her children.

Hill's next published work, The Magic Ladder to Success (1930), proved to be a commercial failure. During the next few years, Hill traveled through the country, returning to his habits from the prior decade of initiating various short-lived business ventures. He was involved in the production of one of the first Mormon films Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love, which collapsed after investors accused Hill of malfeasance. After the film's production, money from Corianton Corporation moved "freely into one of [Hill's] separate enterprises". Hill claimed to have been an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during this time, and to have coined Roosevelt's famous phrase "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

In 1937, Hill published the bestselling book Think and Grow Rich, which became Hill's best-known work. Hill's new wife Rosa Lee Beeland contributed substantially to the authoring and editing of Think and Grow Rich. Hill's biographers would later say this book sold 20 million copies over 50 years, although as Richard Lingeman remarks in his brief biography, "Alice Payne Hackett's 70 Years of Best Sellers suggests the number was considerably less."

Wealthy once more, Hill resumed his lavish lifestyle and purchased a new estate in Mount Dora, Florida. Napoleon and Rosa became involved with The Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, a cult led by James Bernard Schafer, which regarded Think and Grow Rich as a religious text. Napoleon became the godfather of "Baby Jean", a child the cult had unofficially adopted and claimed to be raising in such a way that she would be immortal. In 1941 the child was returned to her biological mother. After being arrested and convicted in 1942, Schafer claimed that Napoleon had been to blame.

The couple divorced around 1940. With much of the wealth from the book going to Rosa, Napoleon returned to his pursuit of success. Rosa proceeded to marry her divorce lawyer. Rosa would later write a self-help book entitled How to Attract Men and Money.

In 1941 Hill published Mental Dynamite, but it was a commercial failure.

Hill met Annie Lou Norman, who was 47 years old, when he rented a room from her. They married in 1943 and relocated to California. Hill went on the lecture circuit once again. In 1947 he briefly hosted a show on KFWB Radio in Los Angeles. In 1952 he launched a new scam selling courses about success in Missouri. The scam soon collapsed, and he set up a firm called Napoleon Hill Associates to sell courses with W. Clement Stone. In the 1960s Hill and Stone fell out. Hill turned to selling his course Science of Success through franchises. In 1963 he founded the Napoleon Hill Foundation.

Hill's "Philosophy of Achievement", offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success, was published initially in the 1928 multi-volume study course entitled The Law of Success, a rewrite of a 1925 manuscript. Hill identified freedom, democracy, capitalism, and harmony as being among the foundations to his "Philosophy of Achievement". He asserted that without these foundations, great personal achievements would not be possible.

Hill claimed his philosophy was superior to those of others and that its principles were responsible for the successes of Americans. Hill blamed failure on such emotions as fear and selfishness.

A "secret" of achievement was discussed in Think and Grow Rich, but Hill did not explicitly identify this secret in the book, insisting that readers would benefit most if they discovered it for themselves.

In the introduction, Hill states of the "secret" that Andrew Carnegie "carelessly tossed it into my mind" and that it inspired Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippine Islands to "gain freedom for his people". Although he mentions a "burning desire for money" repeatedly throughout the book, he suggests that avarice is not his "secret" at all.

Hill returned to the topic of a secret in a 1967 book, where he explicitly stated:

Later in life, Hill claimed that the turning point of his life had been a 1908 assignment to interview the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At that time, Carnegie was among the most powerful men in the world. Hill wrote that Carnegie had actually met with him at that time and challenged him to interview wealthy people to discover a simple formula for success, and that he had then interviewed many successful people of the time. The authenticity of many of Hill's claims has been widely disputed. Napoleon Hill's collaboration with Andrew Carnegie has remained unsupported by any evidence.

The acknowledgments in his 1928 multi-volume work The Law of Success, listed forty-five of those he had studied, "the majority of these men at close range, in person", like those to whom the book set was dedicated: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Edwin C. Barnes (an associate of Thomas Edison). Hill reported that Carnegie had given him a letter of introduction to Ford, who Hill said then introduced him to Alexander Graham Bell, Elmer R. Gates, Thomas Edison, and Luther Burbank.

Endorsements for The Law of Success were allegedly sent in by William H. Taft, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank, E. M. Statler, Edward W. Bok, and John D. Rockefeller. The list in the acknowledgments includes, among those Hill wrote that he had personally interviewed, Rufus A. Ayers, John Burroughs, Harvey Samuel Firestone, Elbert H. Gary, James J. Hill, George Safford Parker, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles M. Schwab, Frank A. Vanderlip, John Wanamaker, F. W. Woolworth, Daniel Thew Wright, and William Wrigley Jr.

Aside from these, Hill's other claims have been called into question. There is little evidence that he aided President Wilson to negotiate Germany's surrender in World War I; that he helped President Roosevelt write his fireside chats; or that he was an attorney. There are no known records of Hill's meetings with the famous men he claimed to have interviewed apart from a brief photo op with Edison.

Napoleon Hill died aged 87 on November 8, 1970. His estimated net worth at the time of his death was about $1 million ($8.29 million in 2025).

Hill's works were inspired by the philosophy of New Thought and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and are listed as New Thought reading. Author and historian Mitch Horowitz has noted Hill's popularization of a “Sixth Sense" as a creative faculty of the subconscious mind.

Hill has been seen as inspiring later self-help works, such as Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. Gizmodo has called him "the most famous conman you've probably never heard of".

The Napoleon Hill Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that promotes the teachings of Napoleon Hill. Following the death of Napoleon in 1970, the foundation and his widow Annie Lou were embroiled in a protracted court battle over the estate, which lasted into the 1980s. The foundation maintains a private archive of Hill's papers. It awards the annual Napoleon Hill Award. The foundation continues to sell Hill's books, courses, and leadership certificates.

In 1995 the authorized biography of Hill's life, A Lifetime of Riches, was released by Michael J. Ritt Jr. (the executive director of the foundation) and Kirk Landers, which came to a number of controversial conclusions.

Outwitting the Devil (1938, published 2011)

Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (with W. Clement Stone) (1959)

Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion (with E. Harold Keown) (1970)