Hill was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound in Southwest Virginia. Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter", initially for his father's paper. He later used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon withdrew for lack of funds.
Hill wrote (but only after Carnegie's death) that the turning point in his life had been a 1908 assignment to interview the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (d. 1919). In 1908, Carnegie was among the most powerful men in the world. Hill claimed that Carnegie had actually met with him at that time and challenged him to interview wealthy people to discover a simple formula for success, and that he had taken the advice to interview successful people of the time. (No documentary evidence of such a meeting has been located.) The acknowledgments in his 1928 multi-volume work The Law of Success, listed 45 of those he had studied, "the majority of these men at close range, in person", like those the book set was dedicated to, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Edwin C. Barnes (an associate of Thomas Edison). Hill reported that Carnegie had given him a letter of introduction to Ford, whom Hill said had then introduced him to Alexander Graham Bell, Elmer R. Gates, Thomas Edison, and Luther Burbank.
According to the publishers, Ralston University Press (Meriden, Conn.), endorsements for The Law of Success were sent in by William H. Taft, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank, E.M. Statler, Edward W. Bok, and John D. Rockefeller. The list in the acknowledgments includes, among those Hill wrote that he had personally interviewed, Rufus A. Ayers, John Burroughs, Harvey Samuel Firestone, Elbert H. Gary, James J. Hill, George Safford Parker, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles M. Schwab, Frank A. Vanderlip, John Wanamaker, F. W. Woolworth, Daniel Thew Wright, and William Wrigley, Jr.
In his declining years, Hill openly described visits from spirits in Chapter 12 of his book, Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind (1967). He described them as unseen friends, unseen watchers, strange beings, and the Great School of Masters that had been watching over him, and who maintain a "school of wisdom". Hill states that the "Master" spoke to him audibly, revealing secret knowledge. Hill further insists that the Masters "can disembody themselves and travel instantly to any place they choose in order to acquire essential knowledge, or to give knowledge directly, by voice, to anyone else." Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind was heavily influenced by Hill's spirit voices; Hill cites the "Master", saying, "Much of what he said already has been presented to you in the chapters of this book or will follow in other chapters.."
Hill's spiritualism was influenced by his negative experience of organized religion as a child. Until very late in life, Hill affected a nonsectarian Judeo-Christian perspective.
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