Hendrik Willem van Loon (pronounced LONE) was born on January 14, 1882, in Rotterdam, Holland. His parents were Hendrik Willem and Elisabeth Johanna Hanken van Loon. Van Loon attended school in Gouda, then transferred to Noorthey, a private institution. His favorite childhood book was Henry Esmond (1852) by William Makepeace Thackeray, which he reread at least once a year.

Van Loon was not close to his father, and spent much of his early life with an uncle. After his mother's death in 1900, he sailed at age twenty to the United States on the steamer Potsdam, and subsequently became a naturalized U.S.

citizen. He studied at Harvard University from 1903 to 1904, and graduated from Cornell University in 1905. He went to work as a correspondent for the Associated Press, first in Washington, D.C., and then in Warsaw, Poland, and in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Leningrad in the Soviet...