In 1927 Napoleon Hill finally assembled what would become the first edition of Law oj Success. Then, in what proved to be a brilliant marketing concept, his publisher chose to release it not as a

single book but as a set of eight volumes. The entire collection was an immediate and astounding success.

In its first edition Law oj Success presented fifteen principles. In

later editions the number was expanded to sixteen as Hill came to

believe that The Master Mind, which had been part of the introduction

to the first edition, was in fact a separate principle unto itsel£

Later still, he concluded that there was another key principle that in

effect unified the others. 

This newly recognized principle he termed

Cosmic Habitforce, which, when he began working with W. Clement

Stone, was also referred to as the Universal Law. Over the years there

have been at least five authorized editions that revised or added

material, and in its various forms the book has been reprinted more

than fifty times. This newly revised and updated twenty-first-century

edition is the first to include all seventeen principles.

In preparing this edition of Law oj Success] the editors have

attempted to allow Hill to be as modern an author as if he were

still among us, and we have treated the text as we would the text of

a living author. When we encountered what modern grammarians

would consider run-on sentences, outdated punctuation, or other

matters of form, we opted for contemporary usage. If something

was obscure or misleading because the author's language was idiosyncratic

or archaic, or when it might be construed as out of step

with modern thinking, minor alterations were made.

A more challenging issue was the question of how to update the

actual content of the book. In carefully reviewing the original text, it

became clear that the answer was not to simply replace the examples

cited by Hill with similar stories about contemporary people.

Theanecdotes and examples used by Napoleon Hill were so integral to

the point being made or the principle being discussed that to replace

them just for the sake of having a more contemporary name would

do nothing to make it better. The editors concluded that the best

course was to instead augment with additional stories that would