Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) was an American writer, publisher and lecturer. After making a fortune as a salesman for the Larkin soap company of Buffalo, he visited William Morris's Kelmscott Press and in 1895 founded the Roycroft community at East Aurora, New York, which produced hand-printed books, furniture and metalwork. His magazine The Philistine and his Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, a series of short biographies issued monthly for fourteen years, carried his breezy, aphoristic style to a wide public, and A Message to Garcia, an essay on initiative, sold in the millions. He and his wife died in the sinking of the Lusitania.