Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you've probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it's the untold story of Hill's fraudulent business practices, tawdry sex life, and membership in a New York cult that makes him so fascinating. That cult would become infamous in the late 1930s for trying to raise an "immortal baby." But even those who know the story of Immortal Baby Jean may not know that the cult was inspired by Hill's teachings, practically using his most famous work as their holy text. Don't worry, the whole story of Napoleon Hill only gets weirder from there. Modern readers are probably familiar with the 2006 sensation The Secret, but the concepts in that book were essentially plagiarized from Napoleon Hill's 1937 classic Think and Grow Rich, which has reportedly sold over 15 million copies to date. The big idea in both: The material universe is governed quite directly by our thoughts. If you simply visualize what you want out of life, those things and more will be delivered to you. Especially if those things involve money. The past few decades have been a profitable era for all sorts of self-help and business success books. Napoleon Hill blazed a trail for an entire industry. But Napoleon's early work is seen as "the source" when people get deep into self-help and business success literature. Hill's Think and Grow Rich is passed around in certain business and real estate circles like some kind of ancient text. In fact, when The Secret emerged on the scene in the mid-2000s, countless entrepreneurial writers would pen their own books, pointing to the works of Napoleon Hill as the true basis for what The Secret called the Law of Attraction.