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Adapted from _The Americanization of Edward Bok_
Edited with an Introduction by John Louis Haney, Ph.D. President, Central High School, Philadelphia
Charles Scribner's Sons New York Chicago Boston Atlanta San Francisco
[Frontispiece: Photograph of Edward Bok.]
THE SCHOOLBOYS AND SCHOOLGIRLS OF AMERICA
WHO BELIEVED THAT AN OBSTACLE IS NOT SOMETHING
AS I HOPE EVERY ONE WHO READS THESE PAGES WILL DO
"Give to the world the best you have And the best will come back to you."
In recent years American literature has been enriched by certain autobiographies of men and women who had been born abroad, but who had been brought to this country, where they grew up as loyal citizens of our great nation. Such assimilated Americans had to face not only the usual conditions confronting a stranger in a strange land, but had to develop within themselves the noble conception of Americanism that was later to become for them a flaming gospel. Andrew Carnegie, the canny Scotch lad who began as a cotton weaver's assistant, became a steel magnate and an eminent constructive philanthropist. Jacob Riis, the ambitious Dane, told in _The Making of an American_ the story of his rise to prominence as a social and civic worker in New York. Mary Antin, who was brought from a Russian ghetto at the age of thirteen, gave us in _The Promised Land_ a most impressive interpretation of America's significance to the foreign-born. The very title of her book was a flash of inspiration.
To this group of notable autobiographies belongs _The Americanization of Edward Bok_, which received, from Columbia University, the Joseph Pulitzer Prize of one thousand dollars as "the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish service to the Nation and at the same time illustrating an eminent example." The judges who framed that decision could not have stated more aptly the scope and value of the book. It is the story of an unusual education, a conspicuous achievement, and an ideal now in course of realization.