Lincoln Steffens: A Biography

Here, from the acclaimed biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, is the life and world of Lincoln Steffens -- the Columbus of muckraking, the father of American investigative journalism, and a pivotal figure in the history of grassroots radicalism.

Justin Kaplan brings alive early twentieth-century America -- a nation in the throes of becoming a great industrial power, a land dominated by big business and beset by social struggle and political corruption. It was the era of Lenin and Sinclair Lewis, of Emma Goldman and William Randolph Hearst, Teddy Roosevelt and John Reed. It was a time of union busting, anarchism, and Tammany Hall.

Lincoln Steffens -- eternally curious, a worldwide celebrity, and a man of magnetic charm -- was part of all he saw: reformism; the progressive movement; organized labor; Greenwich Village's intellectual, sexual, and artistic liberation; the women's suffrage movement; the Russian Revolution; World War I; the Great Depression.

Lincoln Steffens was truly a man of his season, and his life reflects his times: impetuous, vital, creative, striving. In Lincoln Steffens, Justin Kaplan holds a mirror to an outsized American figure and to the tumult of turn-of-the-century America.