Elbert Green Hubbard American Author Born: June 19, 1856 in Bloomington, Illinois Died: May 7, 1915 onboard The Lusitania in the Atlantic Ocean at age 58. Location Interred: Body lost at sea under the Atlantic Ocean with his wife on The Lusitania. --Biographical information from: http://www.roycroft.org

Elbert Green Hubbard was born on June 19, 1856, the third child to a country doctor and his wife in Bloomington, Illinois. His parents had moved west after their sojourn in western New York on the Seneca Indian Reservation. Dr. Silas was from a large News from Mayville, New York, on Chautauqua Lake. Juliana Reed Hubbard, a young teacher, was from Buffalo, New York, the daughter of a bookbinder. Elbert's father was a phrenologist, having studied medicine at Castleton College in Vermont. Apparently, he was a good doctor who never earned much money because he often gave away his services.

With little formal schooling, Elbert Hubbard went to work selling soap for a cousin in Chicago. He married Bertha Crawford in 1879. They moved to Buffalo, where Elbert joined his sister Frances's husband, John Larkin, as a partner in the Larkin Co., another soap business. In 1883, the young Hubbard and their son Bert moved to East Aurora, New York, and for ten years he commuted by train to work in Buffalo.

His liaison with Alice Moore began in the late 1880s; she soon encouraged his writing and subsequent "dropping out" of the "establishment" or traditional world. After a six-week stint at Harvard, he traveled to England to research his Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, soon to be published by J. P. Putnam & Sons. A daughter, Miriam, was born to Elbert and Alice in 1894, and only a year later, Katherine was born to he and his wife Bertha. The man was torn between his respect and love for the two women, but divorce and remarriage was the eventual result between 1902 and 1904.

Elbert Hubbard founded the Roycroft Press in 1895, and two years later, he began building what was to become the Roycroft Campus. The success of his essay 'A Message to Garcia' (1899) (with record sales of 40 million copies!) catapulted him and the Roycroft to fame and enough fortune to build his Roycroft Campus bigger and better. Roycroft employed over 500 craftsmen, working in a pseudo-communal organization at very low wages. From 1900, Hubbard would spend summers on a lecture tour, and his slight frame and "Bohemian" dress, with a ribbon bow tie, became a familiar sight on speaking platforms from coast to coast.

He and his wife perished in the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, 7 May 1915.

• "Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped"