Lifetime of Riches: The Biography of Napoleon Hill » (Abridged)

Michael J. Ritt, Jr. serves as the executive director, secretary and treasurer of the Napoleon Hill Foundation. He worked directly with Napoleon Hill as his assistant for ten years, and has worked for over 40 years with W. Clement Stone.

Kirk Landers is a journalist and freelance writer who has interviewed hundreds of business leaders from around the world, writing articles and columns on what makes companies and individuals succeed.

Napoleon Hill's inspirational classic, Think and Grow Rich, has been a bestseller since its original publication more than fifty years ago. But there has never before been a biography of this influential thinker.

Hill was born in poverty in rural Virginia. A troublemaker, he seemed destined for a bad end until his stepmother took him in hand, gave him a typewriter and encouraged him to write. With a passion born of the desire for success, he worked his way through law school and embarked on a career as a business journalist. In a 1908 interview with Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate challenged the young Hill to codify the rules of achievement that had made America so strong. Hill accepted, and his great work began.

Over the next twenty years he interviewed successful people from all walks of life, finally distilling his discoveries into Think and Grow Rich. But along the way there were plenty of hardships and hard lessons, setbacks that Hill acknowledged came from his own failings.

It is this biography's frank discussion of Hill's private life and his personal struggles that make it so inspiring and useful for any fan of Napoleon Hill. The lessons that Hill taught to others were often lessons he had learned himself, and his eventual triumph is the perfect testament to the power of his conviction:

"WHAT THE MIND OF MAN CAN CONCEIVE, IT CAN ACHIEVE."