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H Irving Hancock Biography & Facts

Harrie Irving Hancock (January 16, 1868 – March 12, 1922) was an American chemist and writer, mainly remembered as an author of children's literature and juveniles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as having written a fictional depiction of a German invasion of the United States. Biography Hancock was born in Massachusetts on January 16, 1868. His parents were William Henry and Laura (Oakes) Hancock. Hancock married Nellie Stein on December 21, 1887. They had two daughters, apparently adopted: Vivian Morris Hancock and Doris Hancock. A prolific author who liked to work at night, Hancock wrote for the New York Journal, the New York World, and Leslie's Weekly. Much of his writing was the kind of "Boy's books" initiated by the famous Stratemeyer Syndicate, based on the assumption (which proved hugely successful) that "boys want the thrill of feeling 'grown-up'" and that they like books which give them that feeling to come in series where the same heroes appear again and again. However, the bulk of Hancock's works in that genre appear to have been handled by publishers other than Stratemeyer. (A comprehensive list of his publications does not yet exist, the list appearing on this page being far from complete). For some time it was considered that, unlike other writers, he invariably used his own name, in the form "H. Irving Hancock". However, Edward T. LeBlanc and J. Randolph Cox, who researched the period's "dime novels", concluded that a series of books attributed to "Douglas Wells" were in fact written by Hancock. The same researchers recount that Hancock "had been a journalist for the Boston Globe from 1885 to 1890 [and] produced more than 50 serials for Norman Munro's juvenile magazine Golden Hours between 1889 and 1901." In 1898 Hancock travelled to Cuba with the US forces as one of several "embedded" reporters and published an account of his war experiences later the same year under the title What One Man Saw, Being the Personal Impressions of a War Correspondent in Cuba. He also reported on the US-Spanish war in the Philippines. His output included westerns, detective stories (set in New Orleans and in Asia), and historical adventures. China and Japan were the setting of such stories as 'The Great Tan-To; or Dick Brent's Adventures in Up-to-Date Japan'." Hancock was charged with perpetuating racial stereotypes in his depiction of the Chinese "Supervillain" Li Shoon in a series of stories published between 1915 and 1917". Conversely, he had a sympathetic attitude toward Japan, setting stories there and coauthoring a book on ju-jitsu with a noted Japanese adept in the art. Hancock's experience as a war correspondent provided inspiration for books about the Spanish–American War. He also published books on physical fitness and an Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Manners, and served as the editor of a "History of West Point". In a magazine article he warned of the dangers of smoking, at a time when such dangers were not widely known. He was also apparently a sports writer and an early Western expert on Jiu-Jitsu. Much of Hancock's writing had a patriotic character, his books and stories having a considerable proportion of military heroes placed in settings ranging from the American Revolutionary War, through the Spanish–American War and the First World War, and up to an imaginary German invasion of the United States (see following section). In addition to his writing activity, Hancock organized the Ferguson-Hancock Laboratories together with Prof. George A. Ferguson in 1908. Hancock died of liver ailments at his home, in Blue Point, Suffolk County, New York on March 12, 1922. Despite the enormous amount of material published by Hancock, some of his biographical details are not completely clear. The 1920 United States Federal Census contains the following: "H. Hancock, Birth: abt 1868 – Massachusetts Residence: 1920 – Brookhaven, Suffolk, New York". This seems to refer to Harrie Irving Hancock, but it is not completely certain—hence the above question mark following the date of his birth. According to Gene Horton of Blue Point, Hancock is buried in an unmarked grave at the Blue Point Cemetery. One Hancock book still in print is The Complete Kano Jiu-Jitsu (Judo), co-authored with Katsukuma Higashi and originally published by G. P. Putnam & Sons in 1905 in New York (presently republished by Dover Publications). "The Invasion of the United States" Hancock's four-book series The Invasion of the United States, published in 1916, depicted a fictional invasion of the United States by Germany in 1920–21—reflecting, and to some degree helping to intensify, the shift of American public opinion towards getting involved in the First World War. It was an American representative of the subgenre known as invasion literature which originated in Britain and was frequent in the early Twentieth Century. This kind of book was criticised —by some politicians at the time and by historians and researchers later— with intensifying bellicose public attitudes in various countries and contributing to escalation and war. Others treated them as reasonable anticipations of the current situation, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 story “Danger!”, in which Britain is brought to her knees by an unnamed power cutting off her food supplies using submarine warfare. The series may have been influenced by William Le Queux's The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) in which the French launch a surprise invasion of England and penetrate into the heart of London but are finally defeated after much desperate and heroic fighting by the British protagonists. The book was highly popular in the early Twentieth Century, and Hancock is likely to have read it. In Hancock's far more extensive version, constituting no less than four books, it is the Germans who launch a surprise attack in 1920, capture Boston despite heroic resistance by "Uncle Sam's boys", overrun all of New England and New York and reach as far as Pittsburgh—but are at last are gloriously crushed by fresh American forces. From the present-day point of view, it can be considered as "retroactive" alternate history. Hancock's plot has a difficulty in that it assumes either an overwhelming German victory over the British, giving them mastery of the seas, or a British "friendly neutrality" and a free hand to invade America. Further, it assumes the German Navy to be capable of utterly defeating the US Navy, followed by ferrying no less than a million German troops across the Atlantic and keeping them supplied for years-long hard fighting. The experience of the first two years of the actual war, at the time of writing, already conclusively proved the Kaiserliche Marine manifestly incapable of anything remotely of the kind. In actuality it was US soldiers who—a year after the story's publication—would pour across a British-dominated Atlantic to assault Germany in Europe. Hancock, therefore, assumed that Germany had won the World War, and t.... Discover the H Irving Hancock popular books. Find the top 100 most popular H Irving Hancock books.