His parents were Mary E. (Tipton) and David Charles Mott, publishers of the weekly What Cheer, Iowa Patriot.
Carl Van Doren, mentioned in the Franklin section below, was teaching at Columbia during this time, and the two may have met then.
In reviewing the book, The New York Times said it is "sure to remain as one of the most valuable and informative resources on the story of our daily press.
"[7] Mott was the chief of the journalism section of the American Army University of Biarritz and was sent to Japan to advice General MacArthur's staff on magazines and newspapers.
[10] His monumental series, A History of American Magazines, started as PhD work at Columbia in the late 1920s.
Presumably, Volume VI would have covered the history from 1931 to Mott's present day, plus additional supplementary materials.
[11] In 1936, Mott collaborated with Chester E. Jorgenson, Instructor in English at the University of Iowa to publish Benjamin Franklin: Representative Selections, With Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes for the American Book Company as part of the American Writers Series.
I am particularly under obligation to you because I am doing a large-scale biography of Franklin, a narrative which will be as dramatic, I hope, as he deserves, and yet will truly embody the recent riches of monographic matters which his earlier biographers have not had to help them.