Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1881, Child went to Harvard University and Law School where he graduated in 1906 to become a business lawyer. Child founded the Progressive Republican League in Massachusetts, a forerunner of the Progressive Party. During World War I, he worked first as a correspondent in Europe and Russia, then for the U.S. Treasury, writing propaganda. In 1916 he published a book, calling for U.S. investment in Russia. After the war he became editor of Collier's Weekly. In 1919 and 1920, Francis X. Bushman and Beverly Bayne successfully toured the playThe Master Thief, based on a story by Child. In 1920 he wrote campaign material for Presidential candidateWarren G. Harding, who rewarded him with the ambassadorship in Italy, where among other diplomatic activities he encouraged Benito Mussolini to start his March on Rome, as he records in his memoir A Diplomat looks at Europe. He also promoted U.S. investment in Italy under Mussolini, especially from the J. P. Morgan bank. After his return to the United States, he became editor for The Saturday Evening Post and served on the National Crime Commission in 1925. In 1926 he divorced. In 1928 he became a paid propaganda writer for Benito Mussolini, whose notes he ghostwrote and serialized as My Autobiography in The Saturday Evening Post, and whose politics he praised in numerous articles for the Hearst press. Together with Thomas W. Lamont he rates as one of the most influential American promoters of Italian Fascism until his death in 1935. Child also wrote a number of crime stories and promotional tracts throughout his career. His Paymaster stories, in which his anti-hero - a criminal dubbed “the Paymaster” - regularly outwitted his opponents, including the police, and other more dangerous villains, were widely known in the first decades of the 20th century. Child was a critic of spiritualism and skeptical of paranormal claims. In his article The Will to Believe he dismissed the medium Eusapia Palladino as a fraud.
