David Graham Phillips, journalist and novelist, is remembered for his final novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), and his muckraking articles, The Treason of the Senate. This series, published in 1906 in Cosmopolitan, prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to label as "muckrakers" the generation of investigative journalists that included Ida M. Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and Lincoln Steffens, as well as Phillips. Actually, Phillips seldom wrote expose journalism but developed most of his social criticism and reform ideas in his twenty-three novels.

Born in the Ohio River town of Madison, Indiana, Phillips came from a prosperous family that encouraged reading and education. Phillips went to Asbury College (now DePauw University) in Greencastle, Indiana, from 1882 to 1885 and to Princeton, from which he was graduated in 1887. Although he left Asbury without a degree, the experience provided a model for the fictional Battle Field University, a midwestern democratic liberal-arts school, where students...