Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) is one of the best-selling self-help books ever published, a fixture on “greatest business books” lists for nearly ninety years. Hill’s own account of how he came to write it, a twenty-year research project he said was personally commissioned by Andrew Carnegie, is almost as famous as the book itself. It’s also the part of his biography that historians have had the hardest time verifying.
From rural Virginia to journalism
Napoleon Hill was born on October 26, 1883, in Pound, Virginia, in the Appalachian region of the state, and died on November 8, 1970, in Greenville, South Carolina, at eighty-seven. He worked at various points as a journalist, a salesman, a magazine editor and a lecturer, and studied law without completing a formal law degree, though he later described himself as an “Attorney at Law,” a title biographers have found no record of him actually earning.
By his own account, Hill’s defining break came in 1908, when he interviewed the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, then one of the wealthiest men in the world, for a magazine assignment. Hill said Carnegie was impressed enough to challenge him, on the spot and without payment, to spend the next twenty years interviewing several hundred successful Americans and distilling their shared traits into a philosophy of achievement that anyone could learn.
The Carnegie story, and what’s actually documented
That story is the founding legend of Hill’s entire body of work, and its evidentiary status is plain: no independent record of a meeting between Hill and Carnegie has ever surfaced. Carnegie’s biographer David Nasaw, working from Carnegie’s own extensive papers and correspondence, found no evidence the two men ever met at all. Hill’s later claims to have advised sitting U.S. presidents and personally interviewed figures like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are similarly undocumented. The Napoleon Hill Foundation, which manages his estate and legacy today, maintains that the Carnegie meeting took place; independent biographers generally describe Hill’s account of his own life as heavily embellished, at minimum.
A disputed origin story
The Carnegie-commissioned-the-research narrative is central to how Think and Grow Rich has been marketed and understood for decades, but it is a claim from Hill himself, not an independently verified historical fact. It’s best treated as the founding legend of Hill’s work rather than settled biography.
This wasn’t the only credibility problem in Hill’s career. Before Think and Grow Rich made him famous, he faced mail fraud charges connected to a lumber business (1908), was accused of selling fraudulent shares in a school under blue sky securities laws (1918), and was charged by the Federal Trade Commission with false advertising (1919). He was also involved in a short-lived multi-level marketing scheme built around an “automobile college,” and in the 1940s was associated with a religious group that later biographers have described in unflattering terms. None of this is disputed the way the Carnegie meeting is; it’s part of the documented record.
Think and Grow Rich: the core teaching
Whatever the truth of its origin story, the book itself set out a structured philosophy of achievement, organized around a set of named principles rather than a single idea. Among the best known: Desire, a specific, burning goal rather than a vague wish; Faith, described as a state that can be deliberately cultivated; Autosuggestion, the repeated, emotionally charged rehearsal of a goal meant to impress it on the subconscious mind; Specialized Knowledge; Persistence; and what Hill called the Master Mind, a small group of people working in close, harmonious cooperation, whose combined thinking he treated as a real, additional source of mental power beyond what any one person could generate alone.
Hill framed all of this as a distillation of traits shared by the successful people he said he’d studied, rather than as pure philosophy, which gave the book a practical, how-to tone distinct from more overtly spiritual New Thought writers like James Allen and Wallace D. Wattles, who came before him. He also wrote a follow-up, Outwitting the Devil, in 1938, structured as an imagined interview with the Devil about why people fail despite knowing his success principles. Hill’s own wife reportedly objected to its content, and it wasn’t published until 2011, nearly seventy-five years later and four decades after his death.
A complicated but enormous legacy
Think and Grow Rich has sold in the tens of millions of copies since 1937 and is still routinely cited by later self-help and success writers as a foundational text. Its structure, a small number of named, learnable principles behind an achievable outcome, became a template that later manifestation and success literature reused constantly, including in works that never credit Hill by name.
That influence sits alongside a documented history of exaggeration and, at points, outright fraud, a record that shouldn’t be smoothed over. The two things aren’t really in tension: Hill was both a genuinely influential popularizer of a certain kind of achievement psychology and someone whose account of his own life doesn’t hold up well under independent scrutiny. Readers encountering Think and Grow Rich today are, in a real sense, encountering both at once.
