Earl Nightingale

Earl Nightingale V (March 12, 1921 – March 25, 1989) was an American radio speaker and author whose work centered on human character development, motivation, and meaningful existence. He came to public life in the age when radio could make a voice familiar across a continent. In the early 1950s, he was the voice of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and from 1950 to 1956 he hosted a program on WGN radio.

Nightingale was born in Los Angeles, California, in March 1921. In 1933, his father, Earl Nightingale IV, abandoned the family, and his mother moved them to a tent in Tent City in Long Beach, on the waterfront behind the Mariner Apartments. At seventeen, Nightingale joined the United States Marine Corps. He served as an instructor at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and was aboard the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor, where he was one of fifteen surviving Marines on the ship that day. He left the military in 1946.

After World War II, Nightingale entered radio, a field that led him into motivational speaking and narration. In the autumn of 1949, he was inspired while reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. In 1956, he produced the spoken-word record The Strangest Secret, which sold more than a million copies and became the first spoken-word recording to receive Gold Record status. Economist Terry Savage later called it “one of the great motivational books of all time.”

His output was remarkable in scale. During his lifetime, Nightingale wrote and recorded more than 7,000 radio programs, 250 audio programs, and also worked in television programs and videos. In 1959, Nightingale-Conant produced Our Changing World, a radio program that aired on more than a thousand stations and became, at the time, the longest-running and most widely syndicated show in radio history. It was heard across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, the Bahamas, 23 additional overseas countries, and the Armed Forces Network.

In 1960, Nightingale narrated a condensed audio version of Think and Grow Rich, and that same year co-founded the Nightingale-Conant Corporation with Lloyd Conant. In the early 1960s, the company released Lead The Field, a cassette-based audiobook in which Nightingale spoke about the secrets of success. It was highly successful and helped create a new industry of audio recorded motivational books. He updated the series in 1987, the same year he published his first book, Earl Nightingale’s Greatest Discovery. Near the end of his life, after retirement and the formation of Keys Publishing with his wife Diana, he created The Winner’s Notebook, combining his texts, illustrations, and space for a private journal.

Nightingale received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International in 1976, was inducted into the National Speakers Association Speaker Hall of Fame, and in 1985 entered the National Association of Broadcasters National Radio Hall of Fame. He also received the Napoleon Hill Gold Medal for Literary Excellency during the mid-1980s. He died on March 25, 1989, in Scottsdale, Arizona, of complications after heart surgery. His words still fit the field he helped build: direct, practical, and aimed at daily thought. As he put it, “Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.”