Bok, Edward William

Related Category: Journalism and Publishing: Biographies

1863–1930, American editor, b. Helder, Netherlands. His family emigrated to the United States in 1870. He founded the Brooklyn Magazine (later Cosmopolitan) in 1883. As editor (1889–1919), he made the Ladies' Home Journal a leading American magazine for women, introducing serious articles and crusades to a medium previously restricted to light entertainment. Bok published fiction by Howells, Twain, Bret Harte, and Kipling and articles by several American Presidents. Of the books he wrote, his autobiographical Americanization of Edward Bok (1920) was the most popular and won a Pulitzer Prize. He engaged in various philanthropic activities, including the erection of the Bok Singing Tower, a carillon in Iron Mountain, Fla., and the endowment of the Woodrow Wilson professorship of literature at Princeton.