Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) was an American author whose books on personal achievement helped found the modern self-help genre. Think and Grow Rich, first published in 1937, has sold tens of millions of copies and remains in print in dozens of languages.

Hill was born in a one-room cabin in Pound, Virginia, in the Appalachian backcountry. He worked as a small-town newspaper reporter in his teens and as a magazine writer in the 1900s. According to his own later account, an interview with the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie around 1908 led to a commission to study the lives of successful American businessmen and distill from them a 'philosophy of personal achievement', a project he said occupied him for the next two decades.

He published The Law of Success in 1928 and Think and Grow Rich in 1937, the latter written during the Great Depression and built around thirteen principles including definite purpose, faith, persistence, and what he called the mastermind alliance. He served as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal and gave lecture tours and radio programmes on motivation for the rest of his life. Later books include The Master Key to Riches and, with W. Clement Stone, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.

Several of Hill's biographical claims, including the details of the Carnegie meeting, have been challenged by later researchers. He died in South Carolina at eighty-seven.

The given name Napoleon is the French form of an Italian masculine name, often linked to the city of Naples through Napoli and to the Greek root for 'lion of the woodland'. It became famous through Napoleon Bonaparte. He bore it through a long writing career.