Bartleby Weekly: May 22, 2000

Bartleby Weekly

Volume I, Issue 10. May 22, 2000

Edward Bok

Peruse the Pulitzer Prize–Winning Autobiography of an American Editor

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After traces the journey of an immigrant of 1870 who “made good.” At an early age, Bok began a correspondence with the great American writers, which grew into the career of a great American editor. Among the accomplishments he considered the most important were his transformation of the Ladies’ Home Journal into the first serious and successful periodical for women and his collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt as writer (see Bartleby.com’s Roosevelt collection).

Told in the third person, Bok deliberately separates his personality of editor from his “real” one—providing insights into both the mantle of objectivity worn by the publisher and the bifurcation, or perhaps “Americanization” affected by a New World work ethic.

Continue to The Americanization of Edward Bok (http://www.bartleby.com/197/).

Experience the Lives of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians

Eminent Victorians—the short vignettes of “an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure—may seem unassuming to the contemporary reader; but, Strachey’s “Victorian visions” set out to revolutionize the writing of biography. Instead of long exposition of dry facts behind which hide the biographer, he places himself as both the artist seeking to reveal the subject’s humanity while remaining impartial: laying “bare the facts as he understands them.”

Continue to Eminent Victorians (http://www.bartleby.com/189/).

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