Phillips, David Graham

Phillips, David Graham

(1867–1911) journalist, novelist; born in Madison, Ind. After graduating from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), he became a journalist, eventually on the New York World (1893–1902), where he wrote editorials for publisher Joseph Pulitzer and went on special assignments, such as covering the Greco-Turkish War (1897). After the success of his first novel, The Great God Success (1901), he became a free-lance writer, publishing more than 20 others. His novels often depicted corruption in government or industry; some, such as Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall (published posthumously in 1917), dealt with such issues as the place of women in society. He also wrote articles, especially for the Saturday Evening Post —most notably a series attacking corruption in the U.S. Senate; a disparaging reference to this series by President Theodore Roosevelt led to the first use of the term "muckraking." In 1911 Phillips was shot to death by a deranged man angered by one of his novels. Phillips's fiction, though popular at the time, later fell into oblivion.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.