Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in Wise County, Virginia. He worked as a secretary, a "mountain reporter" for a local newspaper, the manager of a coal mine and a lumber yard, and attended law school, before he began working as a journalist for Bob Taylor's Magazine--a job that led to his meeting steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, which changed the course of his life. Carnegie believed success could be distilled into principles that any person could follow, and urged Hill to interview the greatest industrialists of the era in order to discover these principles. Hill took on the challenge, which lasted twenty years and formed the building block for Think and Grow Rich, the wealth-building classic and all-time bestseller of its kind, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Hill devoted the remainder of his life to discovering and refining the principles of success. After a long and rich career as an author, magazine publisher, lecturer, and consultant to business leaders, the motivational pioneer died in 1970 in South Carolina.