Since that time my feelings have been an interesting study to myself. There are no longer two personalities. The Edward Bok of whom I have written has passed out of my being as completely as if he had never been there, save for the records and files on my library shelves. It is easy, therefore, for me to write of him as a personality apart: in fact, I could not depict him from any other point of view. To write of him in the first person, as if he were myself, is impossible, for he is not.

The title suggests my principal reason for writing the book. Every life has some interest and significance; mine, perhaps, a special one. Here was a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to make himself understood or even to know what persons were saying; his education was extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write, for a period of years, to the largest body of readers ever addressed by an American editor—the circulation of the magazine he edited running into figures previously unheard of in periodical literature. He made no pretense to style or even to composition: his grammar was faulty, as it was natural it should be, in a language not his own. His roots never went deep, for the intellectual soil had not been favorable to their growth;—yet, it must be confessed, he achieved.

But how all this came about, how such a boy, with every disadvantage to overcome, was able, apparently, to "make good"—this possesses an interest and for some, perhaps, a value which, after all, is the only reason for any book.

Edward W. Bok

MERION, PENNSYLVANIA, 1920

CONTENTS

[An Explanation]
[An Introduction of Two Persons]
[I].The First Days in America
[II].The First Job: Fifty Cents a Week
[III].The Hunger for Self-Education
[IV].A Presidential Friend and a Boston Pilgrimage
[V].Going to the Theatre with Longfellow
[VI].Phillips Brooks's Books and Emerson's Mental Mist
[VII].A Plunge into Wall Street
[VIII].Starting a Newspaper Syndicate
[IX].Association with Henry Ward Beecher
[X].The First "Woman's Page," "Literary Leaves," and Entering Scribner's
[XI].The Chances for Success
[XII].Baptism Under Fire
[XIII].Publishing Incidents and Anecdotes
[XIV].Last Years in New York
[XV].Successful Editorship
[XVI].First Years as a Woman's Editor
[XVII].Eugene Field's Practical Jokes
[XVIII].Building Up a Magazine
[XIX].Personality Letters
[XX].Meeting a Reverse or Two
[XXI].A Signal Piece of Constructive Work
[XXII].An Adventure in Civic and Private Art
[XXIII].Theodore Roosevelt's Influence
[XXIV].Theodore Roosevelt's Anonymous Editorial Work
[XXV].The President and the Boy
[XXVI].The Literary Back-Stairs
[XXVII].Women's Clubs and Woman Suffrage
[XXVIII].Going Home with Kipling, and as a Lecturer
[XXIX].An Excursion into the Feminine Nature
[XXX].Cleaning Up the Patent-Medicine and Other Evils
[XXXI].Adventures in Civics
[XXXII].A Bewildered Bok
[XXXIII].How Millions of People Are Reached
[XXXIV].A War Magazine and War Activities
[XXXV].At the Battle-Fronts in the Great War
[XXXVI].The End of Thirty Years' Editorship
[XXXVII].The Third Period
[XXXVIII].Where America Fell Short with Me
[XXXIX].What I Owe to America
[Edward William Bok: Biographical Data]
[The Expression of a Personal Pleasure]

An Introduction of Two Persons

IN WHOSE LIVES ARE FOUND THE SOURCE AND MAINSPRING OF SOME OF THE EFFORTS OF THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK IN HIS LATER YEARS

Along an island in the North Sea, five miles from the Dutch Coast, stretches a dangerous ledge of rocks that has proved the graveyard of many a vessel sailing that turbulent sea. On this island once lived a group of men who, as each vessel was wrecked, looted the vessel and murdered those of the crew who reached shore. The government of the Netherlands decided to exterminate the island pirates, and for the job King William selected a young lawyer at The Hague.