Barring the ten years he spent as editor of Collier's Weekly, Norman Hapgood is scarcely distinguishable, historically, from a dozen other competent, well-regarded (and forgotten) early twentieth-century magazine editors. In those few years, 1902 to 1912, his editorials, although often criticized as hairsplitting, nonetheless helped set the pace of progressive reform, and his initiatives placed the magazine for a time in the mainstream of muckraking, the era's wide-ranging "literature of exposure." No radical, he was the exemplar of Justin Kaplan's characterization of muckraking as a "fundamentally loyalist, middle-class strategy" (Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, 1974) devoted to repairing the system, rather than altering it. After 1912 Hapgood spent much of the rest of his career trying to repeat the successes of the Collier's years, only to find that magazine audiences were no longer interested in what he had to offer, politically or editorially. He died in relative obscurity, alienated from what he considered...