Oliver Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American self-help author and con man who is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937), which is among the 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 are promoted as expounding principles to achieve "success".
Hill is a controversial figure. Having had a history of criminal charges and fraud accusations, historians also doubt many of his claims, such as that he met Andrew Carnegie and that he was an attorney.
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 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. His father was a dentist, at first unofficially and then with a license.
Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later to Martha. According to Landers and Ritt, 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." At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter", initially for his father's newspaper. At the age of fifteen, he married a local girl who had accused him of fathering her child; the girl later recanted the claim, and the marriage was annulled.
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.
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."
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 abuse of his wife and daughter in addition to his infidelity.
Failed business ventures and charges of fraud
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 on credit from outside Mobile, from other counties in Alabama and Florida, and selling it below cost, and failing to pay back the loan.
His wife Edith filed for divorce in 1908; at the proceedings Hill's friends and business partners testified to his affairs with prostitutes. It is sometime in 1908 that Hill claims his pivotal conversation with Andrew Carnegie happened; however, the existence of such a meeting is a point of contention amongst Hill biographers.
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. 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". 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.
In June 1910, Hill married Florence Elizabeth Horner, with whom he had three sons: James, born in 1911; Napoleon Blair, born in 1912; and David, born in 1918. Hill would postpone their honeymoon until 1919. 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. He subsequently moved to Chicago and accepted a job with the La Salle Extension University, before co-founding the Betsy Ross Candy Shop. Hill was soon forced out of the candy shop by his partners and had left La Salle within a year of starting.
In September 1915, he established the George Washington Institute of Advertising (GWI), 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.
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.
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. 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; Hill 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. White House records include no reference to his ever being there.
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. 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. 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, with Hill claiming to have been the target of the same assassins.
Hill lost control over Hill's Golden Rule to a group of disgruntled employees. Hill attempted to get revenge against one of the employees by reporting them to the FBI as a spy.
Hill founded the Peptomists and the Co-Operative Club which advertised themselves as business organizations in the style of the rotary club.