An American icon... Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill was born in 1833 in the mountains of southwest Virginia in a two-room cabin in an area that he often told his audiences was noted for three things: feuds, moonshine, and ignorant people. In an unpublished biography, Hill reflecting on his childhood, said, “For three generations my people had been born, live, struggled in ignorance and poverty, and died without having been outside the mountains of that section.”

Being born in such a remote area with little opportunity for success, Napoleon Had no reason to expect that he would ever amount to much either. Then everything began to change. He lost his mother when he was only eight years old, his father remarried a year later, and stepmother Martha Ramey Banner entered his life. She was well-educated, cultured, the daughter of a physician, a teacher, and the widow of a school principal. When Martha looked at her new stepson she didn’t see another backwoods boy who was going nowhere, she saw a boy with boundless energy, imagination, and initiative. By the time Napoleon was twelve, Martha had taught him how to use a typewriter. By fifteen, he was writing stories for the regional newspapers.

After graduating from the local two-year high school, Napoleon chose to attend a business college. It was his goal to prepare himself for the job of secretary, which at the time was the entry-level position for a young man who had his sights set on becoming an executive.

Upon the completion of business college, Hill wrote to General Rufus Ayres, one of the wealthiest men in the

region, and asked him for a job. Rufus Ayres, a lawyer by profession, was a true entrepreneur, having his own banking business, coal business, and lumber business. Hill went to work for Ayres, and even though he was very successful and rose quickly in the company, within a couple of years he realized his true passion was to become a lawyer himself.

Napoleon also convinced his brother Vivian to apply to Georgetown Law School and, being the eternal optimist, Hill told Vivian he would support them both. To achieve this, Hill then got a job writing for a magazine owned by Bob Taylor, the former governor of Tennessee and a United States senator. Writing success stories compiled from Napoleon Hill’s interviews would come to define his life’s work.

One of Hill’s first interviews was with the famed steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie’s entire life was a study in the application of what he called his success principles. Carnegie came to the United States as a twelve-year-old with very little education, but by advancing himself from menial job to better job and from minor opportunity to bigger opportunity, by the age of thirty-five Andrew Carnegie had elevated himself to the top rank of America’s empire builders. His crowning achievement was the combining of numerous steelmakers into the huge conglomerate known as U.S. Steel.

Carnegie saw his humble origins as an inspiration to overcoming obstacles and attaining worthy goals, and before their meeting was over, he had challenged Hill to undertake a study of successful men and great leaders so that Hill could compile the information and make it available to others. Hill accepted this challenge, and although Carnegie offered him no salary, he did something that proved to be more important: he introduced Hill to the most creative and successful entrepreneurs, inventors, businessmen, industrialists, and political leaders in America.

Ten years later, Napoleon Hill found the perfect outlet for his research into the secrets of success. Between 1918 and 1924, he launched and published two monthly magazines—first Hill’s Golden Rule and later Napoleon Hill’s Magazine.

Articles written for Hill’s Golden Rule and Napoleon Hill’s Magazine also provided a glimpse into what would become Hill’s future books. When his first book, Law of Success was published in 1928, it was an instant success, paying Hill up to $3,000 per month— a lot of money 92 years ago.

In 1937 Hill completed the book Think and Grow Rich which was so well received that it was reprinted three times in its first year—despite its sale price of $2.50 a copy when the country was in the midst of the Depression. And this was before the mass media and marketing that is available today. Think and Grow Rich continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year worldwide, and has a following of devout individuals who realize that its philosophy-of-success message is as relevant today as when it was first written.

Hill continued to communicate success principles via radio in the 1940’s at the Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood and later at WGN-TV in Chicago. Seminars, lectures, and personal appearances would continue, and finally the founding of the nonprofit Napoleon Hill Foundation to spread information about the principles of success throughout the world. Although Napoleon Hill died in 1970 at the ate of 87, today his writings are more popular than ever.