Hendrik Willem van Loon[a] (January 14, 1882 – March 11, 1944) was a Dutch-American historian, journalist, and children's book author.
Life
On December 20, 1939, a great sympathy meeting for Finland, then embroiled in the Winter War, was arranged in Madison Square Garden. In the picture from the left are former president Herbert Hoover (chairman of the Finland committee), Dr. van Loon, and the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia.
Van Loon was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the son of Hendrik Willem van Loon[2] and Elisabeth Johanna Hanken.[3] He immigrated to the United States in 1902 to study at Harvard University and then Cornell University, where he received his AB in 1905.[4] In 1906[5] he married Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch (1880–1955), daughter of a Harvard professor, by whom he had two sons, Henry Bowditch and Gerard Willem. The newlyweds moved to Germany, where van Loon received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1911 with a dissertation that became his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic (1913). He was a correspondent for the Associated Press during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and again in Belgium in 1914 at the start of World War I.[4] He lectured at Cornell University from 1915 to 1916;[6] in 1919 he became an American citizen.[7]
Van Loon had two later marriages, to Eliza Helen (Jimmie) Criswell in 1920[8] and playwright Frances Goodrich Ames in 1927,[9][10] but after a divorce from Ames he returned to Criswell (it is debatable whether or not they remarried); she inherited his estate in 1944.
Van Loon was a dog lover. His most famous pet was named Mungo, after Sir Walter Scott's dog, grew too large to handle and was sent back to Newfoundland where he was adopted as a mascot by Lieut. Nick Robson. Mungo was photographed on base with Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, and flew onboard missions seeking to bomb Nazi U-boats during World War II.[11][12]
Career
Frontispiece to Van Loon's 1922 book Ancient Man"The Young Nile", illustration by Van Loon for his book Ancient Man, 1922
From the 1910s until his death, Van Loon wrote many books, illustrating them himself. Best remembered among these is The Story of Mankind (1921), a history of the world intended for children, which won the first Newbery Medal in 1922. The book was later updated by Van Loon, then again by his son, and later still by other historians.[13]
He wrote many popular books aimed at young adults. As a writer he was known for emphasizing crucial historical events and giving a full picture of individual characters, as well as the role of the arts in history. He had an informal and thought-provoking style which, particularly in The Story of Mankind, included personal anecdotes. As an illustrator of his own books, he was known for his lively black-and-white drawings and his chronological diagrams.[14]
After having revisited Germany many times in the 1920s, he was banned from the country when the Nazis came to power.[15] In the summer of 1938, during an extended visit to Scandinavia, Van Loon met with refugees who had recently fled Nazi Germany and who gave him first-hand accounts of the terror that they had experienced.[16] His book Our Battle, Being One Man's Answer to "My Battle" by Adolf Hitler (1938) earned him the respect of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in whose 1940 presidential campaign he worked, calling on Americans to fight totalitarianism.[17]
Honors and distinctions
Van Loon was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1922 for his book The Story of Mankind.[10]
Van Loon's Geography: The Story of the World We Live In, 1932, Simon & Schuster
To Have or to Be—Take Your Choice, John Day (1932)
"Gold" 1933, article from the Cosmopolitan March 1933
An Elephant Up a Tree, 1933, Simon & Schuster
An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland by one who was actually born there and whose name is Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 1933, Harcourt, Brace
The Home of Mankind: the story of the world we live in, 1933, George G. Harrap
The story of inventions: Man, the Miracle Maker, 1934, Horace Liveright
Ships: and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (5000 B.C.-A.D.1935), 1935, Simon & Schuster
Around the World With the Alphabet, 1935, Simon & Schuster
Air-Storming: A Collection of 40 Radio Talks, 1935, Harcourt, Brace
Love me not, 1935
A World Divided is a World Lost, 1935, Cosmos Publishing Co.
The Songs We Sing (with Grace Castagnetta), 1936, Simon & Schuster
The Arts (with musical illustrations by Grace Castagnetta), 1937, Simon & Schuster
Christmas Carols (with Grace Castagnetta), 1937, Simon & Schuster
Observations on the mystery of print and the work of Johann Gutenberg, 1937, Book Manufacturer's Institute/New York Times
Our Battle: Being One Man's Answer to "My Battle" by Adolf Hitler, 1938, Simon & Schuster
How to Look at Pictures: a Short History of Painting, 1938, National Committee for Art Appreciation
Folk Songs of Many Lands (with Grace Castagnetta), 1938, Simon & Schuster
The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman 1740-1795 (with Grace Castagnetta), 1939, Simon & Schuster
The Songs America Sings (with Grace Castagnetta), 1939, Simon & Schuster
Invasion, being the personal recollections of what happened to our own family and to some of our friends during the first forty-eight hours of that terrible incident in our history which is now known as the great invasion and how we escaped with our lives, 1940, Harcourt, Brace
Good Tidings (with Christmas songs by Grace Castegnetta), 1941, American Artists Group
The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, with a short life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam who also illustrated the Book, 1942
Van Loon's Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and PlatotoVoltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year, 1942, Simon & Schuster
Christmas Songs, 1942
The Message of the Bells (with music by Grace Castagnetta), 1942, New York Garden City
The Life and Times of Scipio Fulhaber, Chef de Cuisine, 1943
Adventures and Escapes of Gustavus Vasa, and how they carried him from his rather obscure origin to the throne of Sweden, 1945
Report to Saint Peter, upon the kind of world in which Hendrik Willem van Loon spent the first years of his life - an unfinished, posthumously published autobiography, 1947, Simon & Schuster
Notes
^Asked how to pronounce his name, he told The Literary Digest, "I still stick to the Dutch pronunciation of the double o—Loon like loan in 'Loan and Trust Co.' My sons will probably accept the American pronunciation. It really does not matter very much."[1]
^My School Books was a chapter from the unpublished autobiography of Hendrik Willem van Loon made by the DuPont chemical company to demonstrate their new 'PX Cloth' on school books, and distributed free at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Further reading
van Minnen, Cornelis (2005). Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN1-4039-7049-1.
^Rudberg, Pontus (2022). "A transatlantic friendship: Dutch American historian and writer Hendrik Willem van Loon and his wartime Swedish contacts". In Wednel-Hansen, Astrid; Nordström, Katarina; Hoyer, Fransisca (eds.). To Take Us Lands Away: Essays in Honour of Margaret R. Hunt. Uppsala: Uppsala University. pp. 141–153. ISBN978-91-513-1529-4.
