Napoleon Hill

Hill was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound in southwest Virginia.[6] His parents were James Monroe Hill and Sarah Sylvania (Blair) and he was grandson of James Madison Hill and Elizabeth (Jones). His grandfather came to the United States from England and settled in southwestern Virginia during 1847.[7]

Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later to Martha. His stepmother was a good influence for him: "Hill's stepmother, the widow of a school principal, civilized the wild-child Napoleon, making him go to school and attend church."[8] At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter", initially for his father's newspaper.[9] At the age of 15, he married a local girl who had accused him of fathering her child; the girl recanted the claim, and the marriage was annulled.[10]

At the age of 17, Hill graduated from high school and went to Tazewell, Virginia to attend business school. In 1901, Hill accepted a job working for the lawyer Rufus A. Ayers, a coal magnate and former Virginia attorney general. The author Richard Lingeman said that Hill received this job after arranging to keep confidential the death of a black bellhop, whom the previous manager of the mine had accidentally shot while drunk.[8]

Hill left his coal mine management job soon afterwards, and began law school before withdrawing for lack of funds. Later in life, Hill would use the title of "Attorney of Law", although Hill's official biography notes that "there is no record of his having actually performed legal services for anyone."[11]

Hill relocated to Mobile, Alabama in 1907 and co-founded the Acree-Hill Lumber Company. In October 1908, the newspaper The Pensacola Journal reported that the company was liable to bankruptcy proceedings and charges of mail fraud. The newspaper reported that Hill's lumber company had bought lumber from outside Mobile, including other counties in Alabama and even from Florida, before it sold the lumber "at a much lower price and so far as known at this time have made no returns".[12]

During May 1909, Hill relocated to Washington D.C. and initiated the "Automobile College of Washington", where he instructed students to build, chauffeur and sell motor cars.[13] The college assembled cars for the Carter Motor Corporation, which declared bankruptcy during early 1912. During April 1912, the automobile magazine Motor World accused Hill's college of being a scam, using misleading marketing materials that would be "a joke to anyone of average intelligence".[14] Hill's automobile college ended its business later that year.

During June 1910, while managing his automobile college, Hill married his first wife, Florence Elizabeth Horner.[15] The couple had their first child together, James, in 1911, a second child named Napoleon Blair in 1912, and a third son, David, in 1918.[16] After his automobile college ended, Hill relocated to Lumberport, West Virginia with his wife's family. He later relocated to Chicago and accepted a job with the LaSalle Extension University before co-initiating a candy business that he named the Betsy Ross Candy Shop.[17]

During September 1915, Hill established and served as the dean of a new school in Chicago, the "George Washington Institute of Advertising", where he intended to teach the principles of success and self-confidence. On June 4, 1918, the Chicago Tribune reported that the state of Illinois had issued two warrants for the arrest of Hill, who was charged with violating blue sky laws for fraudulently attempting to sell shares of his school with a $100,000 capitalization, despite the school's assets only being appraised at $1200.[18] The school ended soon afterwards.

Later in his life, Hill would say that he spent this time advising president Woodrow Wilson amidst World War I.[19]

After the end of the George Washington Institute, Hill embarked on various other business ventures. He initiated several personal magazines, including Hill's Golden Rule and Napoleon Hill's Magazine. In 1922, Hill also initiated the Intra-Wall Correspondence School, a charitable foundation intended to provide educational materials to prisoners in Ohio. The foundation was directed by, among others, the check forger and former convict Butler Storke, who would be sent back to prison only a year later.[20] According to Hill's official biography, this period was also when hundreds of documents associating Hill with various famous figures were destroyed in a Chicago storage fire.[21]

During 1928, Hill relocated to Philadelphia and convinced a Connecticut-based publisher to publish his eight-volume work The Law of Success. The book was Hill's first major success, allowing Hill to adopt an opulent lifestyle. By 1929, he had already bought a Rolls-Royce and a six-hundred acre property in the Catskill Mountains, with the aid of some lenders.[22]

However, the beginning of the Great Depression affected Hill's finances adversely, forcing his Catskills property into foreclosure before the end of 1929.[23] Hill's next published work, The Magic Ladder To Success, proved to be a commercial failure. During the next few years, Hill traveled through the country, returning to his habits from the prior decade of initiating various short-lived business ventures.

During 1935, Hill's wife Florence filed for a divorce in Florida.

During 1937, Hill published the best-selling book Think and Grow Rich, which became Hill's best-known work. Hill's new wife Rosa Lee Beeland contributed substantially to the authoring and editing of Think and Grow Rich. Hill's biographers would later say this book sold 20 million copies over 50 years, although as Richard Lingeman remarks in his brief biography, "Alice Payne Hackett's '70 Years of Best Sellers' suggests the amount was considerably less."[8]

Wealthy once more, Hill re-initiated his lavish lifestyle and purchased a new estate in Mount Dora, Florida. The couple divorced around 1940, with much of the wealth from the book going to his wife Rosa Lee Hill, leaving Napoleon Hill to start his pursuit of success once again.[16]

Hill met Annie Lou Norman, who was 47 years old, where he rented a room. They married in 1943, and relocated to California. Hill went on the lecture circuit once again.[16]

Later in life, Hill claimed that the turning point of his life had been a 1908 assignment to interview the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (d. 1919). During 1908, Carnegie was among the most powerful men in the world. Hill wrote, after Carnegie's death, that Carnegie had actually met with him at that time and challenged him to interview wealthy people to discover a simple formula for success,[30] and that he had then interviewed many successful people of the time.

The acknowledgments in his 1928 multi-volume work The Law of Success,[24] listed 45 of those he had studied, "the majority of these men at close range, in person", like those to whom the book set was dedicated, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Edwin C. Barnes (an associate of Thomas Edison). Hill reported that Carnegie had given him a letter of introduction to Ford,[31] who Hill said had then introduced him to Alexander Graham Bell, Elmer R. Gates, Thomas Edison, and Luther Burbank.[32]

According to the publishers, Ralston University Press (Meriden, Conn.), endorsements for The Law of Success were sent in by William H. Taft, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank, E.M. Statler, Edward W. Bok, and John D. Rockefeller.[31][32] The list in the acknowledgments includes, among those Hill wrote that he had personally interviewed,[32] Rufus A. Ayers, John Burroughs, Harvey Samuel Firestone, Elbert H. Gary, James J. Hill, George Safford Parker, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles M. Schwab, Frank A. Vanderlip, John Wanamaker, F. W. Woolworth, Daniel Thew Wright, and William Wrigley, Jr.