Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (Pound, Virginia, 1883 - South Carolina, 1970) was an American self-help writer and one of the first to bring the genre to a wide public. He wrote in English in the early twentieth century, during the rise of success culture in the United States, and his name remains tied to Think and Grow Rich. His life is best approached with some caution, since his biographers have questioned much of what he claimed about himself.

He was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound, in southwest Virginia. His mother died when he was nine, and his stepmother, the widow of a school principal, pushed him toward school and church. At thirteen he began writing as a « mountain reporter » for his father's newspaper. At fifteen he married a local girl who had accused him of fathering her child; she later withdrew the claim and the marriage was annulled. He worked in the coal business, where he is said to have helped hide a death at a mine, though the evidence for this is not conclusive. He later used the title of attorney, yet his official biography admits there is no record that he practiced law for anyone.

Between 1907 and 1918 a string of ventures ended badly: a lumber firm in Mobile, Alabama, that faced fraud charges, an automobile college in Washington that a trade magazine denounced as a scam, and an advertising institute in Chicago that shut down after an arrest warrant was issued. He often moved on to new cities and new projects. During the First World War he claimed to have advised President Woodrow Wilson, but White House records contain no trace of such a role. The same is true of his claimed closeness to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Around 1928 he persuaded a Connecticut publisher to issue his eight-volume work The Law of Success, his first major hit, which allowed him to live lavishly. The Great Depression then cost him his property in the Catskill Mountains, and his next book, The Magic Ladder to Success (1930), was a commercial failure. In 1937 he published Think and Grow Rich, which became his best-known work. His second wife, Rosa Lee Beeland, contributed substantially to it. Sales figures claimed by his supporters are disputed by later researchers, who consider them considerably inflated.

His legacy is mixed. Despite the scandals that followed him, Think and Grow Rich remains among the best-selling self-help books ever published, and his conviction that firm expectations and a positive mindset can change a life shaped many writers who came after him. Today he is studied both for his texts and for what his career reveals about the business of selling ideas about success.