Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill: ambition, success, and controversy

Oliver Napoleon Hill was born on October 26, 1883, in a one-room cabin near Pound, a town in the Appalachian region of southwest Virginia. He became known as Napoleon Hill and later built a public career as an American self-help author. His life stretched from the rural world of the late nineteenth century into the mass-market publishing culture of the twentieth, and his name became closely tied to books that promised principles for personal “success.”

Hill’s best-known work is Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, which is among the best-selling self-help books of all time. His books insisted that fervid expectations are essential to improving one’s life, and most of them were promoted as explanations of principles that could help readers achieve success. At the same time, Hill remains a controversial figure. He had a history of criminal charges and fraud accusations, and historians have doubted several of his claims, including that he met Andrew Carnegie and that he was an attorney.

His early life was marked by loss, discipline, and early work with words. Hill’s mother, Sarah Sylvania Blair Hill, died when he was nine. His father, James Monroe Hill, remarried two years later to Martha, whom writers Landers and Ritt described as a good influence who “civilized” the young Hill by making him go to school and attend church. At thirteen, Hill began writing as a “mountain reporter,” first for his father’s newspaper. At seventeen, he graduated from high school and moved to Tazewell, Virginia, to attend business school.

Hill’s adult years mixed ambition with repeated business troubles. He worked for lawyer and coal magnate Rufus A. Ayers, enrolled in law school, and withdrew for lack of funds. Later in life he used the title “Attorney of Law,” though his official biography notes no record that he performed legal services for anyone. He co-founded the Acree-Hill Lumber Company in Mobile, Alabama, which faced bankruptcy proceedings and mail fraud charges in 1908. He later founded the Automobile College of Washington, which was accused by Motor World of being a scam, and the George Washington Institute of Advertising, which closed after fraud allegations by students.

Hill also published magazines, including Hill’s Golden Rule and Napoleon Hill’s Magazine, and continued to present himself as a teacher of self-confidence and achievement. The force of his appeal lies in the directness of his message: the mind, expectation, discipline, and self-command matter. One of the lines associated with him, “Your only limitation is the one you set up in your mind,” captures why readers still return to his words, even while his biography asks them to read with care.