Napoleon Hill

American author — whose Think and Grow Rich (1937) is one of the best-selling self-help books of all time (100M+ copies) — who built his success philosophy on claimed interviews with Andrew Carnegie — despite evidence that many of his claims were fabricated.

Creates the modern self-help genre as success philosophy — Think and Grow Rich's synthesis (desire → faith → autosuggestion → specialized knowledge → imagination → organized planning → decision → persistence) is the template from which virtually every subsequent success self-help book derives.