Napoleon Hill

Oliver Napoleon Hill was born on 26 October 1883 in a one-room cabin near Pound, in Wise County, Virginia. It was a poor corner of Appalachia; his father, James, made a living as a dentist. His mother, Sarah, died when he was nine. Martha, his father's second wife, was an educated woman: she enrolled the boy in school and put a typewriter in his hands.

At thirteen he began filing reports for the small newspapers of the mountain towns; in later years he admitted that what he wrote in slow weeks had been invented. He finished high school at seventeen, spent a short spell at a business college, and in 1901 joined the office of Rufus Ayers, a lawyer and coal operator. His ventures, from lumber to a motoring school, collapsed one after another; in 1908 he moved to Washington, and the magazine he founded in 1919, Hill's Golden Rule, finally found him a readership.

In 1928 he published the eight-volume The Law of Success, which brought him a brief prosperity. His real breakthrough came in the middle of the Great Depression, with Think and Grow Rich, printed in 1937. He rested his account on the claim that in 1908 Andrew Carnegie had charged him with building a philosophy of success; no document confirming that encounter has ever been found. After 1952 he lectured alongside W. Clement Stone, and in 1963 he set up his own foundation.

He wrote in short sentences, in an imperative tone, with formulas repeated until they held; he forged a language that reduced desire, faith and persistence to measurable steps. Most of the stories of meetings with famous industrialists that decorate his books could not be documented, yet this manner of telling became the template of the self-help genre. He died on 8 November 1970 in Greenville, South Carolina, at eighty-seven.