author

Leonard G. Nattkemper

Best known for an early 20th-century dramatic reader and a later small book of verse, this little-known writer worked in the world of spoken expression as well as poetry. His surviving books suggest a strong interest in reading aloud, performance, and the musical side of language.

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."

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 George Wharton James, Leonard G. Nattkemper

About the author

Leonard G. Nattkemper is a little-documented American author whose recorded work points to two main interests: speech and poetry. He is credited, with George Wharton James, on Delight and Power in Speech: A Universal Dramatic Reader, published in 1919 by Radiant Life Press in Pasadena, California.

He also wrote Lights and Shadows, a poetry collection published in 1927 by Press-Telegram Publishing Co. in Long Beach, California. Taken together, those books suggest a writer drawn to both the public power of the spoken word and the more intimate, reflective side of verse.

Because reliable biographical information about him is scarce in the sources available online, many personal details of his life remain unclear. What can be said with confidence is that his work belongs to a period when elocution, reading aloud, and literary recitation were valued parts of education and public culture in the United States.