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Edward William Bok in the frontispiece to A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After

Edward William Bok, American editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, was born on October 9, 1863, in Den Helder, The Netherlands. At the age of six, he immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, USA, and became an office boy with the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1876. In 1882, he began work with Henry Holt and Company, and then, in 1884, he became involved with Charles Scribner's Sons, where he eventually became advertising manager. From 1884 until 1887, Bok was the editor of The Brooklyn Magazine, and in 1886, he founded The Bok Syndicate Press. He obtained the editorship of Ladies Home Journal, published by his father-in-law Cyrus Curtis, in 1889. During his editorship, the journal became the first magazine in the world to have 1 million subscribers. In 1919, after 30 years at the journal, he retired.

Bok is credited with coining the word "living room" to replace the American "parlor".

His autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Gold Medal of the Academy of Political and Social Science and the Pulitzer Prize for best autobiography. Bok died in 1930.

• Successward (1895)
• The Young Man & The Church (1896)
• Her Brother's Letters (1906)
• Why I Believe in Poverty (1915)
• The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920)
• A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, edited by John Louis Haney (1921)
• Two Persons (1922)
• A Man from Maine (1923)
• Twice Thirty (1925)
• Dollars Only (1926)
• You: A Personal Message (1926)
• America Give Me a Chance (1926)
• Perhaps I Am (1928)

Bok is used as an example in Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." He appears in Part Two, Chapter 4 ("How to Become a Good Conversationalist").

• Bok Tower Gardens

• Works by Edward William Bok at Project Gutenberg
• Edward Bok profile at Internet Accuracy Project
• Successward (1895) full text digitized online version from the University of Michigan Library MBooks.