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 the grandson of James Madison Hill and Elizabeth (Jones). His grandfather came to the United States from England and settled in southwestern Virginia in 1847.[7] His father was an unofficial dentist and was also a moonshiner.[5]

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 later recanted the claim, and the marriage was annulled.[10]

At the age of seventeen, Hill graduated from high school and moved 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. Author Richard Lingeman wrote 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 afterward and enrolled in law school before withdrawing owing to a 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]

In 1903, Hill married for the second time to Edith Whitman; in 1905 their child Edith Whitman Hill was born. Their marriage was a fraught one due to Hill's alleged physical abuse of his wife and daughter in addition to his frequenting of prostitutes.[5]

Hill relocated to Mobile, Alabama, in 1907 and co-founded the Acree-Hill Lumber Company. In October 1908, the Pensacola Journal reported that the company was facing bankruptcy proceedings and charges of mail fraud for purchasing lumber from outside Mobile, from other counties in Alabama and Florida, and selling it below cost, thereby failing to generate a return.[12]

His wife Edith filed for divorce in 1908, at the proceedings Hill's friends and business partners testified to his affairs with prostitutes.[5]

It is sometime in 1908 that Hill claims his pivotal conversation with Andrew Carnegie happened, however there is no record of the two meeting and he spent much of the year on the run from the authorities.[5]

Following the exposure of his fraud in Alabama, Hill fled to Washington, DC, where he dropped Oliver as his first name and began going by Napoleon Hill. In 1909 he founded the Automobile College of Washington. The college assembled cars for the Carter Motor Corporation, which declared bankruptcy in early 1912; students were not paid for their labor.[5] During April 1912, the automobile magazine Motor World accused Hill's college of being a scam and derided its marketing materials as "a joke to anyone of average intelligence".[13] Following the bankruptcy of the Carter Motor Corporation, Hill pivoted the organization to teaching people how to sell cars rather than make them. Students were incentivized to themselves sell Automobile College of Washington courses on which they would earn a commission. In practice, the focus was on signing up more students, not in learning how to sell cars. In this form, it resembled a modern multi-level marketing company.[5]

During June 1910, Hill married Florence Elizabeth Horner,[14] with whom he had three sons: James, born in 1911; Napoleon Blair, born in 1912; and David, born in 1918.[15] Horner was in high school when they met and was from a wealthy West Virginia family. Despite investment from her family, the Automobile College of Washington closed in 1912.[5]

He subsequently moved to Chicago and accepted a job with the La Salle Extension University, before co-founding the Betsy Ross Candy Shop. Following his move to Chicago, Hill began claiming that he was a lawyer. Hill was soon forced out of the candy shop by his partners and had left La Salle within a year of starting.[5] In September 1915, he established the George Washington Institute of Advertising, where he intended to teach principles of success and self-confidence. On June 4, 1918, the Chicago Tribune reported that the state of Illinois had issued two warrants for his arrest, charging him with violating blue sky laws by fraudulently attempting to sell shares of his school at a $100,000 capitalization, despite the school's possessing assets appraised only at $1,200.[16]

In 1917, Hill threatened the Illinois Central Railroad with a lawsuit due to low lighting in their cars allegedly making him need glasses. The George Washington Institute was unaccredited and closed in 1918 following allegations of fraud made by students. During this time, Florence and their children were living with her family in West Virginia.[5]

Following the closure of the George Washington Institute, Hill embarked on other business ventures, among them the personal magazines Hill's Golden Rule and Napoleon Hill's Magazine.[17] In 1919 the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against Hill and Hill's Golden Rule for fraudulent advertising and laundering funds meant for a veteran's charity into a fraudulent oil stock scheme. Hill claimed that it was in 1918 following the collapse of GWI that Woodrow Wilson personally reached out to Hill for his help winning the First World War, he claimed that Wilson offered him large sums for his aid but that he did not accept any payment for his work because he was a patriot. He claimed that he was so important and involved in the war effort that he had the power to veto the President. Hill claimed to have participated intimately in the negotiation of the armistice with Germany. These claims are not believed to be true.[5] White House records include no reference to his ever being there.[18]

In 1922, he opened the Intra-Wall Correspondence School, a charitable foundation intended to provide educational materials to prisoners in Ohio. The foundation was directed by, among others, check forger and former convict Butler Storke, who would be sent back to prison only a year later.[17] According to Hill's official biography, it was during this period that hundreds of documents proving Hill's association with various famous figures were destroyed in a Chicago storage fire.[17] Intra-Wall Correspondence School primarily sold Hill's Golden Rule and correspondence courses. In 1923 it was exposed by local newspapers as a scam. Following the murder of Donald Mellett he promoted a lecture tour based on their acquaintance; this event would later become a significant part of his myth with Hill claiming to have been the target of the same assassins.[5]

During 1928, Hill relocated to Philadelphia and persuaded a Connecticut-based publisher to publish his eight-volume work The Law of Success (1925). 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 600-acre (240-hectare) property in the Catskill Mountains, with the aid of some lenders.[19]

The beginning of the Great Depression, however, affected Hill's finances adversely, forcing his Catskills property into foreclosure before the end of 1929.[15] He went broke, forcing his wife's family to pay for the expenses of Florence and her children.[5]

Hill's next published work, The Magic Ladder to Success (1930), 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. He was involved in the production of the first Mormon film Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love, which collapsed after investors accused Hill of malfeasance. Hill claimed to have been an advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt during this time. He claimed to have coined the President's famous phrase "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."[5]

In 1935, Hill's wife Florence filed for and received a divorce in Florida as divorce was illegal at that time in West Virginia. In 1936 Hill met Rosa Lee Beeland when she attended one of his lectures; he proposed the next day, and they were soon married. Unable to afford a place of their own, he and Rosa moved in with Hill's son Blair in New York City. Following a few months of this living arrangement Blair's wife Vera left due to Napoleon Hill's harassment and abuse with Blair following soon after. Before leaving Blair gave his father and Rosa a loan to continue work on a new book, Think and Grow Rich.[5]

In 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. Napoleon and Rosa also become involved with The Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, a cult led by James Bernard Schafer which regarded Think and Grow Rich as a religious text. Napoleon became The Godfather of "Baby Jene", a child the cult had adopted and claimed to be raising in such a way that she would be immortal. In 1941 the child was returned to her biological mother. After being arrested and convicted in 1942 Schafer claimed that Napoleon had scammed him.[5]

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.[15] Rosa proceeded to marry her divorce lawyer. Hill and Rosa never repaid Blair for the $300 loan with Rosa taunting Blair.[5]

In 1941 Hill published Mental Dynamite but it was a commercial failure.[5]

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.[15] In 1947 he briefly hosted a show on KFWB Radio in Los Angeles. In 1952 he launched a new scam selling courses about success in Missouri. The scam soon collapsed, and he set up a firm called Napoleon Hill Associates to sell courses with W. Clement Stone. In the 1960s Hill and Stone fell out with Hill turning to selling his course Science of Success through franchises. In 1963 he founded the Napoleon Hill Foundation.[5]

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. At that time, Carnegie was among the most powerful men in the world. Hill wrote, after Carnegie's death in 1918, that Carnegie had actually met with him at that time and challenged him to interview wealthy people to discover a simple formula for success,[29] and that he had then interviewed many successful people of the time. The authenticity of many of Hill's claims has been widely disputed. Napoleon Hill's collaboration with Andrew Carnegie has never been confirmed either by Carnegie himself or the Carnegie estate, and Hill allegedly only started making claims of interviewing Carnegie after he had died. Aside from Hill's writings, there are no accounts of the meeting taking place. Carnegie biographer David Nasaw stated that he "found no evidence of any sort that Carnegie and Hill ever met" or "that the book was authentic."[5]

The acknowledgments in his 1928 multi-volume work The Law of Success,[20] listed forty-five 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,[30] who Hill said then introduced him to Alexander Graham Bell, Elmer R. Gates, Thomas Edison, and Luther Burbank.[31]

Endorsements for The Law of Success were allegedly sent in by William H. Taft, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank, E. M. Statler, Edward W. Bok, and John D. Rockefeller.[30][31] The list in the acknowledgments includes, among those Hill wrote that he had personally interviewed, 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.[31]

Aside from these, Hill's other claims have been called into question. There is no known evidence that he aided President Wilson to negotiate Germany's surrender in World War I; that he helped President Roosevelt write his fireside chats; or that he was an attorney. There are no known records of Hill's meetings with the famous men he claimed to have interviewed besides for a brief photo op with Edison.[32]

The Napoleon Hill Foundation is a nonprofit foundation which promotes the teachings of Napoleon Hill. Following the death of Napoleon in 1970 the foundation and his widow Annie Lou engaged in a protracted court battle over the estate which lasted into the 1980s. The foundation maintains a private archive of Hill's papers. It awards the annual Napoleon Hill Award, in 2014 the award was given to Organo Gold. The foundation continues to sell Hill's books and courses as well as leadership certificates.[5]