author
Leonard G. Nattkemper
An early 20th-century writer and speech educator, he is best remembered for work that blended practical public-speaking instruction with a love of literature and performance. His surviving books suggest a teacher interested in helping readers speak with clarity, confidence, and feeling.
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 was an American author and educator active in the early 1900s. He is associated with Delight and Power in Speech (1919), a substantial dramatic reader and speech manual created with George Wharton James, and with Lights and Shadows (1927), showing his range from instructional writing to more literary work.
Contemporary newspaper material describes Professor Leonard G. Nattkemper as a member of the faculty of the College of Oratory at the University of California and praises him as a skilled reader. That fits well with the focus of his best-known book, which was designed to help students and speakers improve oral reading, memory, and public speaking.
Biographical details on him are limited in easily confirmed public sources, but genealogical records identify him as Leonard Gustav Nattkemper, born in 1885 and deceased in 1967. Even from the small record that remains, he comes across as a teacher-writer who cared deeply about the spoken word and its power to move an audience.