The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After

by Edward William Bok

Overview

The Americanization of Edward Bok is an autobiography, told in the third person, that shares the life of a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to make himself understood or even to know what persons were saying; his education extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write 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. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781775413738
Publisher:	The Floating Press
Publication date:	01/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	418 KB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER I THE FIRST DAYS IN AMERICA The leviathan of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1870, was The Queen, and when she was warped into her dock on September 20 of that year, she discharged, among her passengers, a family of four from the Netherlands who were to make an experiment of Americanization. The father, a man bearing one of the most respected names in the Netherlands, had acquired wealth and position for himself; unwise investments, however, had swept away his fortune, and in preference to a new start in his own land, he had decided to make the new beginning in the United States, where a favorite brother- in-law had gone several years before. But that, never a simple matter for a man who has reached forty-two, is particularly difficult for a foreigner in a strange land. This fact he and his wife were to find out. The wife, also carefully reared, had been accustomed to a scale of living which she had now to abandon. Her Americanization experiment was to compel her, for the first time in her life, to become a housekeeper without domestic help. There were two boys: the elder, William, was eight and a half years of age; the younger, in nineteen days from his landing-date, was to celebrate his seventh birthday. This younger boy was Edward William Bok. He had, according to the Dutch custom, two other names, buthe had decided to leave those in the Netherlands. And the American public was, in later years, to omit for him the "William." Edward's first six days in the United States were spent in New York, and then he was taken to Brooklyn, where he was destined to live for nearly twenty years. Thanks to the linguistic sense inherent in the Dutch, and to an educational system that compelsthe study of languages, English was already familiar to the father and mother. But to the...