David Graham Phillips

David Graham Phillips (1867–1911) was an American novelist and investigative journalist, best remembered as one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era. Born in Madison, Indiana, and educated at Asbury (now DePauw) University, Phillips began his career as a reporter for newspapers in Cincinnati and New York, eventually joining the New York Sun and the New York World. His work combined fiction with sharp social criticism, exposing corruption in politics, business, and high society.

Phillips achieved national prominence with "The Treason of the Senate" (1906), a Cosmopolitan magazine series that indicted U.S. senators as tools of corporate interests; it helped provoke President Theodore Roosevelt's famous "muckraker" speech. As a novelist, he wrote more than twenty books exploring money, marriage, gender, and power. Notable titles include "The Great God Success" (1901), "The Cost" (1904), "Old Wives for New" (1908), "The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig" (1909), and "The Grain of Dust" (1911). His posthumously published masterpiece, "Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise" (1917), portraying a woman's struggle for independence, was adapted into a 1931 film starring Greta Garbo. Phillips was fatally shot in New York City in January 1911, aged 43.