David Graham Phillips is often remembered by historians as the New York crusading journalist at whom Theodore Roosevelt directed his famous "Man with the Muck-Rake" speech of 14 April 1906, when the popular president, angered at Phillips's attack in The Treason of the Senate on Roosevelt's friend Senator Chauncey Depew, assailed "hysterical sensationalism" in the press and deplored what he regarded as indiscriminate, prodigal assaults on men in public life. During those turbulent days when epithets like "Undesirable Citizens, Mollycoddles, Rich Malefactors, Commercial Highwaymen, Dirty Infidels, Paid Prevaricators, and Holders-of-ill-gotten Gain" were an integral part of the nation's emotional landscape, David Graham Phillips wrote twenty-three novels which both illustrated the virtues of rugged individualism and dissected the American sociopolitical scene. He simultaneously clamored for reform of the nation's political system, spoke out strongly in behalf of "The New Woman," and achieved a popular blend of realism and romance in best-selling...