Brooklyn, 1880. A teenage boy sat at home with a set of Appleton's Encyclopedia open in front of him.

It was the first thing he had bought with his own earnings. He was an office boy at the Western Union Telegraph Company in Manhattan. He skipped lunch to save the money, and walked the five miles home to Brooklyn instead of riding. It took a while, but at last the books came through the door.

He bought them to find something out. Some of the great men who passed through his office every day, the railroad magnate Vanderbilt, Alexander Graham Bell of the telephone, Thomas Edison of the electric light, had never been to college. How had they risen to the top?

That year James A. Garfield's name was in the papers every day, and people said he would likely be the next President. The books said the general had once worked as a boy on a canal tow-path. The boy began to wonder: was it true?

He wrote to General Garfield and asked him straight out whether the tow-path story was true, and explained why he was asking.

Garfield answered, warmly and fully. The boy showed the letter to his father, who said it was valuable and he should keep it.

That remark changed his life. His name was Edward Bok. Forty years later he put all of this into his autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok. In the whole book he never says "I." He says "Edward."

The Dutchman

On September 20, 1870, The Queen, one of the giants of the Atlantic, was warped into her New York dock, and a Dutch family of four came ashore.

The father was forty-two. In the Netherlands he had been a man of standing, until unwise investments swept his fortune away. Rather than start over at home, he chose the United States, where a favorite brother-in-law had gone some years before. The mother had always lived with servants; here, for the first time in her life, she would keep house herself. The elder son, William, was eight and a half. The younger, Edward, would turn seven in nineteen days.

After six days in New York the family moved to Brooklyn. The parents knew English; the boys did not understand a word. Yet the morning after the move, the father took them to a public school. If they were to be Americans, the sooner they learned the language for themselves, the better. Graded by age, the brothers were put in separate classes and could not even keep each other company.

At the first recess a crowd of boys surrounded them. They nicknamed Edward "Dutchy" and went after him every noon and after school. After a few days he picked out the boy who seemed to be the ringleader and struck first. The other boy fought back, but before long Edward was looking down at him on the ground. The boys around them turned respectful, the girls giggled, and a path opened for the brothers to go home. This, he said, was his first lesson in Americanization. To be safe, he gave two or three more.

At school he also refused to copy the flourishes of the Spencerian script in his copybook. His teacher kept him for two hours; he sat quietly and wrote nothing. The principal struck his right hand with a rattan, then told him to write; he still would not. At home he showed his father the swollen hand and a sample of plain Italian script he had found in a newspaper, and said this simpler hand was more practical. The next morning his father went with him to see the principal, and the two men talked behind a closed door. A few weeks later Edward was given a new copybook in a plain style, and soon he wrote the best hand in his class.

The Bakery Window

The father never found his footing in America. The methods of a lifetime did not fit the new country, the family grew poorer, and the mother's health broke under the work. The brothers rose before dawn to build the fire, make breakfast and wash the dishes, and after school they swept and scrubbed. When there was no kindling or coal in the morning, they went out in the evening with a basket to pick up wood in vacant lots and the bits of coal spilled in front of the grocery.

Their mother protested. Edward said: This is America, where one can do anything if it is honest. So long as we don't steal it, why shouldn't we get it? His mother turned away and said nothing.

He found his first job in front of a bakery window. The baker came out to look at the trays he had just set out and found a hungry boy staring at them.

"Look pretty good, don't they?" asked the baker.

"They would," said the boy, "if your window were clean."

"That's so, too," said the baker. "Perhaps you'll clean it."

"I will."

From then on he cleaned the window every Tuesday and Friday after school, for fifty cents a week. The chronology at the back of the book records it: 1873, Frost's Bakery, Smith Street, Brooklyn.

Later he served behind the counter for an extra dollar a week, with the understanding that he could take a little of the unsold goods home to his mother each day. On Saturday mornings he delivered a weekly paper, the South Brooklyn Advocate. On Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when the horse-cars to Coney Island stopped at the corner to water the horses, he jumped aboard with a shiny new pail and three glasses hung from its rim and sold ice water at a cent a glass. When other boys copied him, he squeezed half a dozen lemons into each pail, added sugar, and sold lemonade at three cents.

He also wrote up a party, careful to include the name of every guest, and took it to the city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, pointing out that everyone named would buy the paper. The editor paid him three dollars a column.

On Monday, August 7, 1876, Edward, thirteen, left school and became office boy in the electricians' department of Western Union at six dollars and twenty-five cents a week.

Six Weeks on the Tow-Path

Now back to the letter.

Garfield really had worked on a canal. According to the National Park Service at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, in 1848 the sixteen-year-old Garfield drove the animals that towed a boat on the Ohio canals for about six weeks, until malaria sent him home. By the 1880 election those six weeks had become a powerful campaign image.

So what Bok was asking about was not just a childhood memory but a campaign image that was turning into legend. He had asked the right question: the story was true, only shorter than the legend. Bok did not reprint Garfield's reply; he says only that the general answered "warmly and fully."

His father's word "valuable" set him thinking. If one such letter was valuable, what about a hundred? From then on he worked through the encyclopedia and wrote to the famous. He did not want bare signatures but letters that might teach him something: a question about a disputed episode in one life, a date the encyclopedia had left out of another. As he tells it, General Grant marked on a rough sketch map the spot where Lee surrendered, and Tennyson copied out a few stanzas on condition that Edward never again use the word "awful," which the poet said was slang, and "I hate slang."

There is outside evidence for when he began. A note from Mark Twain to "Mr. E. W. Bok," written at Hartford on November 20, 1880, survives; Twain apologizes that he was so busy with the election he forgot all about it.

The Confederate general Jubal Early wrote to him giving his reason for burning Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. A friend of his father's saw the letter and suggested sending it to the New York Tribune, and it set off a national debate. The Tribune sent a reporter to the house, who wrote a long article, and soon papers around the country were writing about "the well-known Brooklyn autograph collector."

But the hobby only cost money: stationery, postage, car fare. One day in a restaurant, the man next to him opened a box of cigarettes and threw the picture of an actress that came inside onto the floor. Bok picked it up. The back was blank. Why not print a short biography there, so the picture would be worth keeping? The next day, in his lunch hour, he found the Knapp Lithographic Company, which made the cards. Joseph P. Knapp answered on the spot: ten dollars apiece for one-hundred-word biographies of one hundred famous Americans.

When he could not keep up, he paid his brother and a few journalists he trusted five dollars a biography and edited their work. He soon found that editing other people's copy paid better than writing his own.

A Paper Bag of Nuts

In those years, whenever someone he had corresponded with came to New York, he looked up the "distinguished arrivals" in the papers and went uptown after work to give his thanks in person.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was where most famous visitors stayed. While waiting to be received, he would slip upstairs and sit on a soft sofa outside the dining room, watching the well-dressed diners come and go, and wonder whether he would ever eat there just once.

One evening he called on General and Mrs. Grant. He had killed time until seven, assuming the general dined at six like his own family and would be finished. Instead Grant said it might be better for them all to go down to dinner first and see the collection afterward. So he walked into that dining room. Two Black head waiters bowed low and showed the party to their table. He felt the whole room was looking at him and wondering why he was there.

He could not remember what he ate or said. He remembered only that before they rose, Mrs. Grant asked the waiter for a paper bag, emptied a whole dish of nuts and raisins into it, and gave it to him "to eat on the way home." Upstairs afterward, the general smoked a cigar and read through the letters. At one from General Sherman he chuckled, reread it, and turned to his wife: "Julia, listen to this from Sherman. Not bad."

Bok had asked Sherman to write out the line "The pen is mightier than the sword." Sherman replied that he could not, because it was not true. Lincoln, a great and good man, had wielded a powerful pen and yet had to call a million flaming swords to his aid.

As Bok remembered it, that same evening he also sat at the sickbed of Lincoln's widow, and on his way home met the former Confederate President Jefferson Davis at the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway. The book reproduces a signature of Mary Lincoln dated October 13, 1881.

The Wine-Glasses

Hoping to get ahead, he studied shorthand at the Brooklyn YMCA and at a business college at the same time. On December 21, 1880, the New England Society of Brooklyn held its first annual dinner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, attended by President Hayes, Grant and Sherman. The Brooklyn Eagle sent Bok to report what Grant and the President said, the President's speech word for word.

When the reporters came in, the waiter set wine-glasses in front of him. He had never tasted wine and decided not to begin that night, so he asked the waiter to take the glasses away to make room for his notebook. Hayes spoke too fast for him, and the other reporters fared no better. After the speeches he went up to the President, explained that this was his first important assignment, and asked whether he could have a copy of the speech.

The President looked at him for a moment and asked him to wait. Fifteen minutes later he came back and asked first: why did you have the wine-glasses removed? Then he had Bok write his name and address on a place-card, said he was staying with Mr. A. A. Low in Brooklyn Heights, and offered him a ride. At Low's house the President went upstairs and came down with the speech in his own hand. It was past midnight. He asked what time Bok had to be at work; half past eight, said Bok. Then just turn that in as it is, said the President; I can get another copy. Bok learned later that it was the only copy. He copied it that night anyway and returned the original in the morning. The next day the Eagle was the only paper with the President's speech in full.

That evening a note was waiting at home: the President and Mrs. Hayes asked him to call at half past eight. He had no evening clothes and went in the best he had. The butler looked at his card and said: "The President and Mrs. Hayes are waiting for you!" He stayed two hours, talking about his encyclopedia and his dinner with Grant. Afterward, he says, Hayes wrote to him almost every month until late 1892.

Where America Fell Short

After that things moved fast. He worked as a stenographer for Henry Holt and then for Charles Scribner's Sons, edited a magazine in the evenings, and started a newspaper syndicate. On October 20, 1889, at twenty-six, Bok became editor of The Ladies' Home Journal in Philadelphia and stayed thirty years. By his own account, no American editor before him had addressed so many readers. In 1896 he married Mary Louise Curtis, the only child of the publisher Cyrus Curtis.

Yet this book about how an immigrant succeeds changes its voice in its last two chapters and for the first time speaks as "I." One of them is called "Where America Fell Short with Me."

The Dutch, he wrote, taught him thrift, and Americans taught him waste. The Dutch taught him to do things thoroughly, and Americans taught him "That's good enough." In seven years at three public schools no teacher ever made a particular effort to teach a foreign boy English; his father worked with him evening after evening.

In 1884, when he turned twenty-one and could vote for the first time, no one could tell him whether, born abroad, he had the right. Only after six municipal offices did he learn that his father's naturalization had made him a citizen too. He wanted to read the two party platforms and could not buy them anywhere, so he cut them from a newspaper's files, printed them as pocket booklets, and sold them through the news companies at ten cents each, clearing over a thousand dollars in three weeks. But when he asked what a vote meant, one party chairman told him: on Election Day you go up to the ballot-box and put your ballot in, and that's all there is to it. The librarian at the Brooklyn Library did not know of a book that could tell him.

"Yet you succeeded," it will be argued, he wrote. That may be, but I did not succeed by reason of these shortcomings: it was in spite of them, by overcoming them, and that is a result not everyone can achieve.

Two Edwards

On September 20, 1920, fifty years to the day after he landed, The Americanization of Edward Bok was published; the next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. In his preface he explained the third person: Edward Bok the editor and publicist was a personality apart from his private self, and he had often watched that Edward at work with amusement, sometimes applauding him and sometimes criticizing him.

The device makes the book read like a novel whose hero almost never loses and nearly always chooses right. Many of its scenes, such as the principal changing the copybook rule, the dinner with Grant, and meeting Mrs. Lincoln and Jefferson Davis on the same night, rest on his word alone.

On January 9, 1930, Bok died at his estate near Lake Wales, Florida, and was buried at the foot of the tower he had paid to build. The Library of Congress holds his papers, among them autograph albums from 1880 to 1889.

The boy who read the encyclopedia did not believe it all. He wrote to ask: is this true? Readers of his book can put the same question to him.

[SOURCES, VERSIONS, AND EDITORIAL LIMITS]

1. Scenes, dialogue and feelings come from Edward Bok's autobiography The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920); no dialogue is invented. Quotations are the author's own translations, with the English originals collected in the Chinese version's quotation notes. The book was written when Bok was fifty-seven, entirely in the third person, and many scenes rest on his word alone; the narrative marks these with "as he tells it," "he says" or "as Bok remembered it."

2. The Garfield letter: chapter III says only that Garfield "was then spoken of for the presidency"; it gives no year and does not reprint the reply. This story dates it to 1880. Supporting evidence is Mark Twain's note to "Mr. E. W. Bok" of November 20, 1880 (Mark Twain Project letters catalog, UCCL 13374, which records it from a Sotheby's sale catalog; unpublished). Garfield's roughly six weeks on the canal in 1848, and their use as a campaign image in 1880, follow the National Park Service.

3. The principal's change of the copybook rule, and his taking it to the board of education, are told in the book as something Bok's mother told him later; no contemporary record was found, so the narrative stops at the new copybook.

4. Hayes and the wine-glasses: chapter IV gives no date and lists the President, Grant, Sherman, Evarts and Sheridan, with Hayes staying at A. A. Low's on Columbia Heights. The Chicago Tribune dispatch of December 22, 1880, and the Brooklyn society's history identify the first annual dinner of the New England Society of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Hayes, Grant, Sherman and Evarts present and A. A. Low among the speakers; Sheridan is not among the speakers listed. Bok calls himself "a boy of sixteen," but by his birth date of October 9, 1863, he was seventeen. The Eagle's exclusive and Hayes's near-monthly letters rest on his word.

5. The Grant dinner, Mrs. Lincoln and Jefferson Davis: chapter III gives no date; the book reproduces a Mary Lincoln signature dated October 13, 1881. The book's own sequence contradicts this: in chapter IV, on the night of the Hayes dinner of December 21, 1880, Bok is already telling Hayes about "his evening with General Grant," which would put the Grant dinner before December 1880, while the Lincoln signature puts it in October 1881. Both cannot be right; this story leaves the date open and does not map the event. Mary Lincoln was in New York for treatment in the autumn of 1881 (Lincoln Lore, March 28, 1932; Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association; her letter of October 14, 1881, on Clarendon Hotel stationery), but these sources name the surgeon Lewis Sayre and a hotel, while Bok names "Doctor Holbrook's sanitarium"; whether these are the same place was not established, so the narrative says only "sickbed." No contemporary record was found for Davis's presence in New York that night. The book also mentions calling on "President Garfield," who took office in March 1881 and died that September; it gives no particulars, and the story omits it.

6. Dates of birth (October 9, 1863, Den Helder), arrival (September 20, 1870), the bakery (1873), Western Union (August 7, 1876), the Journal editorship (October 20, 1889), marriage (October 22, 1896), retirement (September 22, 1919) and publication (September 20, 1920) follow the book's own chronology.

7. "Where America Fell Short" follows chapter XXXVIII and represents Bok's views of 1920. He dates his first vote and the platform booklets to 1884.

8. The 1921 Pulitzer Prize is from the Pulitzer Prizes website. His death on January 9, 1930, at his Mountain Lake estate near Lake Wales, and burial at the tower, follow the New York Times of January 10, 1930, and Bok Tower Gardens. The autograph albums of 1880–1889 are from the Library of Congress catalog record of his papers.

9. This story covers only his path from immigrant boy to editor and his late criticism of America; his thirty years as editor, including his campaign against patent-medicine advertising and his views on woman suffrage, are not covered.

Sources: Edward W. Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), Project Gutenberg eBook #3538 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3538), public domain in the US; cited by chapter, since the e-text has no print pages. Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1880, p. 6; New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, "A History of the Society"; Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, list of Hayes speeches, no. 595; National Park Service, James A. Garfield NHS brochure (2023) and "A Fickle Current"; Mark Twain Project, letters catalog, UCCL 13374; Lincoln Lore, March 28, 1932; Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, "Unpublished Mary Todd Lincoln"; New York Times, January 10, 1930; Bok Tower Gardens, "Edward Bok"; The Pulitzer Prizes, "Edward Bok"; Library of Congress, Edward William Bok papers.