For three decades, Edward W. Bok filled the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal with sentimental verities--hard work, frugality, perseverance, honesty, common sense, service, and relentlessly congenial optimism--that helped forge an American middle-class ethos and built the Journal into the nation's first magazine to reach a circulation of one million subscribers. Bok used his editorship to educate his readers and to promote modest reform in the areas of advertising, patent medicine, and sex education. His immensely popular Pulitzer-prize winning autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), fused the selfhelp sensibilities of Benjamin Franklin with the pluck of Horatio Alger.

Born 9 October 1863 in the seaport town of Helder, The Netherlands, Edward William Bok was the second son of William John Hidde Bok and Sieke Gertrude Bok. The Bok family was descended from a line of distinguished Dutch burghers. Bok's great-grandfather was an admiral in the Dutch navy, his grandfather was...