Hendrik Willem van Loon

Hendrik Willem van Loon , 1882-1944, American author and journalist, b. Rotterdam, Netherlands. He emigrated to the United States in 1903 and studied at Harvard and Cornell (B.A., 1905). He was an Associated Press correspondent in Russia during the revolutionary outbreak of 1905 and in Belgium at the beginning of World War I. His numerous popular histories include The Story of Mankind (1921), The Story of the Bible (1923), Tolerance (1925), America (1927), and R. v. R. (1930), a fictional biography of Rembrandt.

Van Loon, Hendrik Willem (1882–1944), born in Holland, came to the U.S. as a young man and graduated from Cornell (1905). He served as a foreign correspondent and attended the University of Munich (Ph.D., 1911). A Short History of Discovery (1918) was the first of the books that won him a reputation as a popularizer of encyclopedic subjects. His surveys, marked by a genially familiar style that is reflected in his own sketchy illustrations, include Ancient Man (1920); The Story of Mankind (1921); The Story of the Bible (1923); Tolerance (1925), a history of the rise of religious tolerance; America (1927); Man, the Miracle Maker (1928); Van Loon's Geography (1932); Ships & How They Sailed the Seven Seas (1935); The Arts (1937); and The Story of the Pacific (1940). His other works include Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant (1928); R. v. R. (1930), a fictional biography of Rembrandt; Thomas Jefferson (1943), an intimate biography; and Van Loon's Lives (1942) and Report to St. Peter (1947), autobiographies.