Hopkins was born in 1866 in a small town in Michigan. His mother was Scottish, his father a newspaperman from a long line of Freewill Baptist ministers. Claude was subject to a strict evangelical upbringing, by the lights of which, as he would write, “seemingly every joy in life was a sin.” When his father abruptly abandoned the family, Hopkins, aged ten, became the sole wage earner, laboring as a boy janitor, delivering papers, and selling silver polish.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 77