Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) stands at the headwaters of the entire modern success movement — the Appalachian farm boy whose 1937 book Think and Grow Rich became the bestselling success title of all time, and the source from which a century of prosperity teaching, from Earl Nightingale to Bob Proctor to The Secret, ultimately flows. Born in a one-room cabin in the mountains of Wise County, Virginia, Hill lost his mother at nine and began hustling early, working at thirteen as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers. The story he told of his great turning point became one of the most famous origin tales in publishing: that in 1908, as a young magazine writer, he interviewed the steel titan Andrew Carnegie — who challenged him to spend twenty years studying America's most successful men and distil a philosophy of achievement anyone could use. Whether that meeting happened as told is now genuinely doubted by historians — Hill's colourful life included business collapses, fraud accusations, and five marriages, and several of his grandest claims resist documentation — but what is beyond dispute is what he produced from the quest itself.

The Law of Success (1928) and above all Think and Grow Rich (1937) codified the principles that became the DNA of personal development: definiteness of purpose, burning desire, faith, autosuggestion, persistence, the "Master Mind" alliance, and the conviction stamped into his most famous line — "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Drawing on the stories of Edison, Ford, and the industrial giants of his age, Hill argued that success follows discoverable laws of thought, and that the humblest reader could apply them. The Depression-era public agreed by the millions. His later partnership with the insurance magnate W. Clement Stone produced Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude and carried his "PMA" philosophy into the postwar boom, while a manuscript he'd written in 1938 — Outwitting the Devil, a daring dialogue on fear and freedom deemed too controversial in his lifetime — waited until 2011 to become a posthumous bestseller.

Hill died in South Carolina in 1970 at eighty-seven, having established the nonprofit Napoleon Hill Foundation to carry his philosophy forward — which it does to this day, publishing his authorized editions, certifying instructors, and reporting the remarkable fact that Think and Grow Rich sells more copies now than it did while he lived. He remains the most quoted, most imitated, and most argued-about figure in success literature: a flawed, self-invented man whose personal legend may wobble under the historian's lamp, but whose central gift — the insistence that an ordinary person's thoughts, purpose, and persistence matter decisively — has outlived every doubt. The cabin-born reporter conceived and believed; a hundred million readers later, the achievement, at least, is not in question.