Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill grew up in a one-room cabin near Pound, in the mountains of southwest Virginia. At 13 he began to write as a local reporter. He studied at a business school, started law school but left for lack of money, and spent the next two decades in sales, magazine publishing and short-lived business ventures. Several of these ended in bankruptcy or charges of fraud.

In 1928 he published The Law of Success, and in 1937 Think and Grow Rich. The book sets out thirteen steps to wealth: a burning desire for a definite goal, faith, autosuggestion, a written plan, a mastermind group and persistence. Its central claim is that thoughts, held with enough desire, turn into their physical equivalent. It became one of the best-selling self-help books ever written.

Hill said that Andrew Carnegie commissioned him in 1908 to interview hundreds of successful men and distill their methods. Historians have found no evidence for the commission or for many of the interviews. Hill lectured and wrote for the rest of his life and died in South Carolina in 1970.