Legacy

Master Key System Myths: Ban, Hill, Gates and Sales

2026-10-10 · About 5 minutes

Few self help books come with as many legends attached as The Master Key System. Read the back cover of a modern reprint or a few sales pages online and you will meet the same stories again and again: the book was banned by the church in the 1930s, Napoleon Hill credited it for his success, Bill Gates read it at Harvard, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. This page checks each one. For every story we say what is documented, what is unverified, and where the story seems to come from.

A short note on method: we looked for primary sources such as letters, decrees, interviews, publisher records and contemporary reports, not just repetitions of the claim. A story repeated on a hundred websites is still only as strong as its first source.

Myth one: the church banned it in 1933

The claim. Many sales listings say the book was "banned by the Church in 1933" and then "hidden away for seventy years." Some versions say it was banned by unnamed religious groups.

What is documented. Nothing that we could find. No version of the story names which church, which official body, or which document did the banning. We found no decree, no contemporary newspaper report, and no scholarly history of New Thought that records a ban. One modern publisher of the text has openly said it could neither confirm nor disprove the rumors that surround the book.

What is unverified. The entire claim. It is possible that individual clergy disapproved of the book, since New Thought ideas about God and mind were criticized by many Christian writers of the period. But disapproval is not a ban, and there is no record of a formal one.

Where it seems to come from. The phrase "hidden away for seventy years" counts forward from 1933 to about 2003, which suggests the wording was written for reprint marketing in the early 2000s, when the text was out of copyright and new editions were appearing online. A banned book is an appealing story for a seller. That is our inference from the wording, not a documented origin.

Was it ever hidden? Not in any strong sense. The text was published as a correspondence course in 1912, issued as a book in the following years, and reprinted. The 1919 St. Louis edition carries a copyright notice for that year and survives in libraries; the copy used for the free online text at sacred-texts.com is that edition.

Myth two: Napoleon Hill wrote Haanel a letter crediting his success

The claim. In 1919, Napoleon Hill, later the author of Think and Grow Rich (1937), wrote to Charles Haanel to say that his success was "due largely to the principles laid down in The Master-Key System." The circulating text says this success followed his work "as President of the Napoleon Hill Institute."

What is documented. The text of the letter is widely quoted. Wikipedia repeats it, citing a website devoted to Haanel and a 2007 book by Karen Kelly about The Secret. So it is documented that the letter has been published and attributed to Hill.

What is unverified. We could not find a scan of the original letter, an archive that holds it, or an independent scholar who has examined it. That does not prove it is fake. It does mean the claim rests on reprints, not on a checked original.

Context worth knowing. Napoleon Hill is a hard source to lean on. Historians doubt many of his own claims about his life, and a 2016 Gizmodo article by Matt Novak was titled "The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time." In 1919 his main venture was a personal magazine, Hill's Golden Rule, and the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against him and the magazine that year. Standard accounts of his career list his George Washington Institute of Advertising, which closed in 1918, but we did not find independent evidence of a "Napoleon Hill Institute" operating in 1919. That is a question worth asking of the letter, not a verdict on it.

Where it seems to come from. The letter is part of the material that publishers and fans of Haanel have reprinted since the book's revival. It is an attractive endorsement because Think and Grow Rich became one of the best known success books of the twentieth century.

Myth three: Bill Gates read it at Harvard

The claim. Bill Gates found The Master Key System while at Harvard, and it inspired him to drop out and found Microsoft.

What is documented. Nothing that links Gates to the book. We found no interview, speech, memoir passage or biography in which Gates mentions Haanel. The well documented account of his departure from Harvard is that in 1975 he left to write software with Paul Allen for the Altair 8800, an early personal computer kit. That story is told by Gates himself and by his biographers.

What is unverified. The whole claim. Even the sales copy that repeats it often begins with "rumor has it."

Where it seems to come from. As with the church ban, the story appears in reprint blurbs and online listings. Attaching a famous name to a public domain book is a common sales tactic. If you see this story presented as fact, ask for the source.

Myth four: it sold 200,000 copies by 1933

The claim. The Master Key System sold over 200,000 copies by 1933, sometimes paired with stories about wealthy buyers paying high prices for the course.

What is documented. That the course was sold by mail and was heavily promoted in Elizabeth Towne's New Thought magazine The Nautilus. Even Wikipedia frames the sales figure carefully, saying the book "allegedly" sold that many copies.

What is unverified. The number itself. We found no publisher's records, sales ledgers or contemporary trade report that confirms it. It may be close, too high, or too low. Without a primary source, there is no way to say.

Today. Because the text is in the public domain, it is printed by many publishers and given away free online. No one has a reliable total for modern sales, and any precise figure you see should be treated with caution.

A bonus myth: the "lost chapters"

Some editions advertise "lost" chapters 25 to 28. The original course had 24 Parts. According to Wikipedia, the extra chapters were copied from chapters 11 to 14 of Haanel's later book A Book About You. They are genuinely by Haanel, but they were not lost from The Master Key System, and they were never part of it.

Why the myths spread

Several forces work together here. The book is in the public domain, so many publishers compete to sell the same text and reach for dramatic hooks. The success of The Secret in 2006 and 2007 sent a wave of new readers looking for its sources. And the book's own subject, a hidden key to power, makes stories about suppression and secret famous readers feel natural.

None of this takes away from what is documented: that Charles Haanel wrote a carefully structured New Thought course, that it was promoted and sold widely in its day, and that it remains in print and influential more than a century later. Those facts are interesting enough without the legends.

References

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