During the Progressive era of social and political reform, David Graham Phillips was one of the original "muckrakers" who used their reporting skills to expose political and business corruption. Phillips began his career as a newspaper reporter and freelance magazine writer. Although best known today for his Cosmopolitan magazine series The Treason of the Senate (1906; published in book form in 1953), he considered himself a fiction writer and became one of the most popular novelists of his time. Phillips published twenty-four novels, two plays, and a collection of three novellas, selling an average of one hundred thousand copies per book; yet, his reputation as a novelist did not persist long past his death. Phillips used both journalism and fiction to expose hypocrisy in high society, corruption in state and national politics, and uncontrolled graft, questionable accounting, and monopolizing in big business, the stock market, and insurance agencies. He was...