author
Leonard G. Nattkemper
Best known for a substantial early-20th-century guide to reading and public speaking, this little-documented writer helped shape a book that treated speech as both a practical skill and an art. His surviving works suggest a strong interest in clear expression, dramatic reading, and personal experience turned into print.
1 Audiobook
Delight and power in speech : A universal dramatic reader; a new, complete and practical method of securing delight and efficiency in silent and oral reading and private and public speech; together with a large and varied collection of carefully chosen selections in prose and poetry, with chapters on "The cultivation of the memory" and "After dinner speaking."
by Leonard G. Nattkemper, George Wharton James
About the author
Leonard G. Nattkemper is a fairly obscure American author, and only a small amount of reliable biographical information is easy to confirm online. Catalog and library records consistently connect him with Delight and Power in Speech: A Universal Dramatic Reader, a large instructional anthology published in Pasadena, California, in 1919 with George Wharton James.
That book was designed as a practical handbook for silent and oral reading, public speech, memory work, and after-dinner speaking, which gives a good sense of Nattkemper's literary interests. Library and bookseller records also associate him with Lights and Shadows, first published in 1927, showing that his work extended beyond one title.
Some genealogy-style sources identify a Leonard Gustav Nattkemper born in 1885 and deceased in 1967, but because those records do not clearly prove that he is the same person as the author, it is safer to leave that connection uncertain. No clearly verifiable portrait image was found from the sources reviewed.