Napoleon Hill

The Law of Success appeared in 1928 in eight volumes and made Napoleon Hill (1883 to 1970) the founding voice of American success writing, a line running through Think and Grow Rich (1937) and most of the motivational shelf since. He said the work rested on twenty years of interviews with Andrew Carnegie and other industrialists. Historians have not been able to confirm that he ever met Carnegie, that he was the attorney he claimed to be, or that he advised Franklin Roosevelt. Several of his own ventures, among them the Automobile College of Washington and the George Washington Institute, closed amid fraud accusations. Outwitting the Devil, an imagined interview in which the Devil explains how fear and drifting keep people small, was written in 1938; his widow Annie Lou blocked it, and the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which still manages his estate, released it only in 2011 with annotations by Sharon Lechter. Read him as a preacher of self-belief rather than a reporter of fact.