Hubbard is known best as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.

He and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, died aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine SM U-20 off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915.

I had no ambitions then—I was sure that some day I could spell down the school, propound a problem in fractions that would puzzle the teacher, and play checkers in a way that would cause my name to be known throughout the entire township.

"[1]: 14  Mary would remember her older brother's role as a school troublemaker, noting that he "annoyed his teachers... occasionally by roaring inappropriately when his too-responsive sense of humor was tickled.

"[1]: 15 Elbert's first business venture was selling Larkin soap products, a career which eventually brought him to Buffalo, New York.

[2] Hubbard ... was reborn, in middle age, as Fra Elbertus, the owner, leader, prophet, and boss of Roycroft, a quasi-communal, neomedievalist (after William Morris), semiutopian community of residences and shops that specialized in the printing of handsome leather-bound, hand-illumined books, and in the manufacture of furniture, pottery, leather goods, rugs, baskets, stained-glass lamps and windows, candy, painting, music, all of which bore the Roycroft name.

Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William Morris-inspired socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American know-how.

[7] An example of his trenchant critical style may be found in his saying that prison is, "An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied and competition is eliminated.

Hubbard subsequently wrote of the disaster,[11] singling out the story of Ida Straus, who as a woman was supposed to be placed on a lifeboat in precedence to the men, but refused to board the boat, and leave her husband.

[14] When his application for a passport was denied in 1915, Hubbard went directly to the White House and pleaded with Woodrow Wilson's personal secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty.

At the time, the President was in the midst of a cabinet meeting, but Tumulty interrupted and, as a result, the Secretary of State (William Jennings Bryan) and Attorney General Thomas Gregory were also able to hear of Hubbard's situation and need.

[16] Seventy-five percent of those petitioning for clemency during that fiscal year were not so fortunate; their requests were denied or adversely reported or no action was taken.

On May 7, 1915, while at sea 11 miles (18 km) off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, the ship was hit by a single torpedo and sunk by the German U-boat U-20.

[21]: ii  In A Message to Garcia and Thirteen Other Things (1901), Hubbard explained his Credo by writing "I believe John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy to be Prophets of God, and they should rank in mental reach and spiritual insight with Elijah, Hosea, Ezekiel and Isaiah.

Contributors to a 360-page book published by Roycrofters and titled In Memoriam: Elbert and Alice Hubbard included such celebrities as meat-packing magnate J. Ogden Armour, business theorist and Babson College founder Roger Babson, botanist and horticulturalist Luther Burbank, seed-company founder W. Atlee Burpee, ketchup magnate Henry J. Heinz, National Park Service founder Franklin Knight Lane, success writer Orison Swett Marden, inventor of the modern comic strip Richard F. Outcault, poet James Whitcomb Riley, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elihu Root, evangelist Billy Sunday, intellectual Booker T. Washington, and poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Mack Bolan, the main character of Don Pendleton's fiction series The Executioner, frequently cites as inspiration a Hubbard quote, "God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, or degrees – but for scars.

[26] A quote of Hubbard's from his biography of American automotive developer John North Willys, "Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing, and you'll never be criticized", is often misattributed to Aristotle.