Who was Gustav Stickley?

From Leslie Greene Bowman, American Arts & Crafts: Virtue in Design (Boston, 1990), pp. 34-35:

"The leading promoter [of American arts and crafts] was Gustav Stickley (United States, 1858-1942). A veteran of the furniture business, he was converted to arts and crafts ideas while on a visit to England in the late 1890s. Already familiar with the writings of Ruskin and Morris prior to this trip, he was, upon his return, moved to found United Crafts in order 'to promote and to extend the principles established by Morris, in both the artistic and the socialistic sense...to substitute the luxury of taste for the luxury of costliness; to teach that beauty does not imply elaboration or ornament; to employ only those forms and materials which make for simplicity, individuality and dignity of effect.' [Gustav Stickley, "Foreword." The Craftsman I, no. 1 (October 1901), p.1]... "Stickley's designs were an extreme departure from the plethora of over-decorated styles produced for the middle-class market. He declared that his furniture must fill 'its mission of usefulness as well as it possibly can; it must be well-proportioned and honestly constructed,' and admitted that 'massive simplicity is the leading characteristic of the style.' To market the products of his Morris-inspired guild, Stickley went to Grand Rapids, the center of middle-class furniture production. He launched his new line at the Grand Rapids Furniture Fair in 1900. His forms were refreshingly simple and the rhetoric appealing; his success at the fair attracted imitators almost immediately. "Stickley recognized the difficulty of persuading customers to visit craft studios and special exhibitions of arts and crafts. While he exhibited in many of those arenas, he was careful to keep his products available in mainstream establishments. He retailed his lines through conventional channels: furnishing companies in cities across America. "Stickley not only adapted his methods to the existing market, he set about influencing that market with the publication of a monthly magazine, The Craftsman, beginning in 1901. As editor he styled it as a how-to manual for living the arts and crafts life-style, noting that 'where The Craftsman hopes to be of service is in suggesting how to create an environment where simple needs are met in a simple, direct way; in pointing out how a home may be built up where lives may be lived out in peace and happiness, where children may grow up in surroundings that make for good citizenship, and where good work may be done because of the silent influences of space, freedom and sincerity.'" (Bowman, pp. 70-71:) "Although Stickley is often credited as being the father of the American arts and crafts movement, he is better designated its chief promoter. When he founded his workshops, the movement was already known in the United States through domestic and international journals such as The House Beautiful, International Studio, and Deutsche Kunst [Art] und Dekoration. The Roycroft community was already producing furniture, as was Charles Rohlfs. Arts and crafts societies had been formed in Boston and other cities. Stickley was joining a small tide of sentiment that sided with English philosophies of art and labor. What he contributed was mass marketing, publicity, and a unique American style.... "Craftsman furniture is characterized by thick boards of quarter-sawn white oak, visible mortise-and-tenon joinery, and heavy, cast and hammered hardware. White oak, a native wood, was suitable for Stickley's new American style. It was also among the strongest and most enduring of woods. Pre-industrial carpenters had found oak easier to rive than saw, because it split naturally along medullary rays, revealing a unique rib-boned grain. Riven oak was also less susceptible to shrinkage and expansion. Quarter-sawn oak, sawn parallel to its radial structure in imitation of riving, appealed to Stickley...."