The 48 Laws of Power has been reported to be much requested in American prison libraries, and has been studied as a first-year text in some US colleges. Fast Company called the book a 'mega cult classic', and The Los Angeles Times noted that The 48 Laws of Power turned Greene into a 'cult hero with the hip-hop set, Hollywood elite and prison inmates alike'. The 48 Laws of Power has sold over 1.2 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 24 languages. He would note this as the turning point of his life.

Greene wrote the treatment, which would later become The 48 Laws of Power. However, at the time Greene was rereading his favorite biography about Julius Caesar and took inspiration from Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon River and fight Pompey, thus inciting the Great Roman Civil War. Īlthough Greene was quite unhappy in his job, he was comfortable and saw the time needed to write a proper book proposal as too risky. Greene pitched a book about power to Elffers and six months later, Elffers requested that Greene write a treatment. In 1995, Greene worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school, and met a book packager named Joost Elffers. Greene initially formulated some of the ideas in The 48 Laws of Power while working as a writer in Hollywood and concluding that today's power elite shared similar traits with powerful figures throughout history. The book is a New York Times bestseller, selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States it is popular with prison inmates and celebrities. The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is a non-fiction book by American author Robert Greene.

The 48 laws