This book is a Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography of an influential publisher and editor. Here was a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to make himself understood or even to know what persons were saying; his education was extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write, for a period of years, to the largest body of readers ever addressed by an American editor—the circulation of the magazine he edited running into figures previously unheard of in periodical literature. He made no pretense to style or even to composition: his grammar was faulty, as it was natural it should be, in a language not his own. His roots never went deep, for the intellectual soil had not been favorable to their growth;—yet, it must be confessed, he achieved. But how all this came about, how such a boy, with every disadvantage to overcome, was able, apparently, to make good—this possesses an interest and for some, perhaps, a value which, after all, is the only reason for any book.
