Napoleon Hill
| Napoleon Hill | |
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Portrait of Napoleon Hill, 1904
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| Born |
October 26, 1883 Pound, Virginia |
| Died | November 8, 1970 (aged 87) South Carolina |
| Occupation | Author, Journalist, Salesman, Lecturer |
| Citizenship | American |
| Period | 1928–1971 |
| Literary movement | Self-help |
| Notable works |
Think and Grow Rich (1937) The Law of Success (1928) Outwitting the Devil (1938) |
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Napoleon Hill (born Oliver Napoleon Hill; October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American self-help author. He is well known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937) which has sold 20 million copies and is among the top 10 best selling self-help books of all time. Hill's works insisted that fervid expectations are essential to improving one's life. Most of his books were promoted as expounding principles to achieve "success".
Hill was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound in Southwest Virginia. 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 in 1847. Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter", initially for his father's paper. At the age of 15, he briefly married a local girl who had accused him of fathering her child; the girl later recanted the claim, and the marriage was subsequently annulled.
At the age of 17, Hill graduated high school and went to Tazewell, Virginia to attend business school. In 1901, Hill took a job working for the lawyer Rufus A. Ayers, a coal magnate and former Virginia attorney general. Six months later, at the age of 19, Hill was promoted to manager of one of Ayre's mines.According to the author Richard Lingeman, Hill received this position after arranging to cover up the death of a black bellhop, whom the previous manager of the mine had accidentally shot while drunk.
Hill left his coal mine management job shortly afterwards, and entered law school before withdrawing for lack of funds. Later in life, Hill would claim a 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."
After becoming estranged from Whitman, Hill moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1907 and co-founded the Acree-Hill Lumber Company. Novak accuses Hill of running this company as a fraudulent scheme; between 1907 and 1908, Hill took between $10,000 and $20,000 worth of lumber on credit, and then sold off the lumber at low prices without intending to repay his creditors. By September 1908, the Pensacola Journal reported that Hill was on the run, as he faced criminal proceedings, bankruptcy proceedings, charges of mail fraud, and warrants for his arrest.
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