Edward Bok was the editor of the Ladies Home Journal from 1889 to 1919. During his editorship, the journal became the first magazine in the world to have 1 million subscribers. After retirement, he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography: The Americanization of Edward Bok.
Wikipedia entry for Edward Bok.
The Americanization of Edward Bok at Project Gutenberg.
The Americanization of Edward Bok was the 98th Lakeside Classic. You can download the book as a .lit (Microsoft Reader) file at the RR Donnelley website.
Edward Bok Quote
“It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.”
— Edward Bok
100 Best U.S. Wedding Destinations
How to tie that subject line to the Bibliofuture Author Spotlight?
Here goes:100 Best U.S. Wedding Destinations published in 2006 list Bok Tower Gardens.
Flickr picture of Bok Tower.
Detail shot of Bok Tower.
Sundial and dedication on Bok Tower.
Bok’s Controversial Work
Why I Believe in Poverty
While Bok enjoyed considerable public success during his lifetime, he also incited a number of critics who decried his paternalistic attitude toward women, his sentimentality, and his oversimplification of complex problems. Why I Believe in Poverty as the Richest Experience That Can Come to a Boy was particularly singled out by commentators, who observed that Bok’s universal application of his own experience failed to adequately confront the difficulties of entrenched poverty and the realities of helplessness and resignation that frequently accompany it. The Americanization of Edward Bok was extremely well-received upon its publication, but the work has since declined in esteem as modern scholars observe that Bok quite characteristically employed the American themes of opportunity and advancement—previously elevated to near-legendary status in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger—to describe his own arc of success. Other modern assessments of Bok have tended to focus on his accomplishments as an editor of one of America’s most popular monthly periodicals and to analyze the rather simplified image of benevolent middle-class virtue he presented in his writings.
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