Best known as a leading voice in the journalistic movement known as muckraking, Lincoln Steffens had a career that spanned more than three decades. As a young reporter he exposed corruption and questioned the established order in American political life. Steffens used his role as newspaper reporter and editor to chronicle and criticize the growth of the United States as an industrialized world power in the twentieth century. Steffens's own life as a writer, as both The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931) and his letters show, paralleled the innocence and optimism experienced by the United States. A student of his times, Steffens applied the tenets of scientific investigation and social Darwinism to interpret the social, economic, and political realities of Progressive-era America. Steffens called himself a "frustrated liberal," and his attempts to debunk public misperceptions regarding the true state of democracy paralleled his own "life of unlearning" boyhood illusions...