Brand Whitlock successfully combined the careers of political activist and professional man of letters. A progressive politician, four-term reform mayor of Toledo, Ohio, and American minister (later ambassador) to Belgium during World War I, honored internationally for his services to that nation throughout its occupation by German troops, he preferred to think of himself as a man of letters and was determined to be, together with his friends Henry James and William Dean Howells, a great American novelist.

Born in Urbana, Ohio, of Scotch-English ancestry, to the Reverend Elias D. and Mollie Lavinia Brand Whitlock, Whitlock was raised in a series of Methodist parsonages in Ohio and was strongly influenced by his father's strong sense of personal responsibility as well as by his love of language and the great English novelists of the nineteenth century. Educated at home and later at a public high school in Toledo, he...