Napoleon Hill Audiobooks

Almost every modern success book is standing on Napoleon Hill’s shoulders, whether or not it admits as much. Born in a one-room cabin in Wise County, Virginia in 1883, Hill worked as a jobbing journalist before setting out to codify what he believed successful people had in common, interviewing and observing industrialists and inventors over two decades.

The result was The Law of Success in 1928 and then, at the depth of the Depression, Think and Grow Rich in 1937, a book that has never been out of print and remains among the best-selling self-help titles ever published. Hill also ran his own magazines, Hill’s Golden Rule and Napoleon Hill’s Magazine, in the years after the First World War.

His reputation is complicated. Later biographers have found much of his own life story hard to verify, and parts of it look like self-invention. What is not in doubt is the influence. Definiteness of purpose, the mastermind group, autosuggestion and persistence became the standard vocabulary of motivational writing, and by his death in 1970 he had shaped an entire industry.

Napoleon Hill’s Golden Rules: The Lost Writings is the best-rated of his titles here and the most interesting way in. It collects the essays he wrote for his own magazines and for Success between 1919 and 1923, so you meet the ideas in their first, rawer form, before the polish of the later bestsellers.

Oliver Wyman narrates at around seven hours, briskly and without the evangelical push that so often disfigures this genre, which makes the historical curiosity of the material much easier to enjoy.

A longer compilation pairs Think and Grow Rich with The Science of Getting Rich, Wallace D. Wattles’s 1910 essay on the same theme by a different author entirely. Read by Marlon Percy, it runs to almost twenty-one hours and puts both foundational texts in one place. Browse what is available below and start with the Golden Rules.