Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, a seminal early text in self-help literature. Born on October 26, 1883, in a one-room cabin in Pound, Virginia, Hill grew up in poverty and hardship. His parents, James Monroe Hill and Sarah Sylvania Blair, struggled to make ends meet.

Hill described his early career as marked by a series of ups and downs. He claimed to have worked as a newspaper reporter, a lawyer, and even a mountain guide before becoming a writer and lecturer. In reality, although he did briefly attend law school, Hill never worked as a lawyer despite using the title “Attorney at Law.” In 1908, Hill claimed to have landed his first major assignment as a journalist for Bob Taylor’s Magazine, where he was tasked with interviewing Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest men of his time. Carnegie, impressed by Hill’s ambition and intellect, challenged him to dedicate his life to studying the principles of success and distilling them into a practical philosophy that could benefit millions—a suggestion that shaped the rest of Hill’s career. However, many of Hill’s claims about his life—including this encounter with Carnegie—were later called into question and likely never occurred. In reality, during the early 1900s, Hill started several failed companies, was persecuted for fraud at least three times in relation to several different ventures, spent a significant portion of time fleeing authorities, and was getting a divorce from his first wife, who left because of Hill’s frequent experiences with sex workers.

In his book, Hill describes spending decades immersing himself in the study of success, interviewing hundreds of the world’s most successful individuals, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, and Theodore Roosevelt, to identify a set of common principles and strategies that he believed were necessary for achieving success. These interviews ostensibly led to Hill’s The Law of Success (1925), a guide to achieving personal and professional fulfillment that became popular enough to fund Hill’s lavish lifestyle and his second divorce.

Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937, in which he outlined 13 principles for achieving wealth and success, including the power of desire, faith, and persistence. The book’s interest in mysticism and the supernatural led Hill and his third wife to form a cult called The Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which regarded his book as a sacred text. In 1962, Hill and his fourth wife co-founded the Napoleon Hill Foundation, dedicated to preserving his teachings and promoting personal development. Napoleon Hill died on November 8, 1970, at the age of 87. His books continue to be read to this day.