muckraker

muckraker

Any of a group of U.S. writers identified with pre-World War I reform and exposé literature. The term, first used derisively, originated in an allusion Theodore Roosevelt made in 1906 to a passage in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress about a man with a muckrake who “could look no way but downward.” Later it took on favourable connotations of social concern and exposure of corruption and injustice. The movement emerged from the yellow journalism of the 1890s and from popular magazines, such as a 1903 issue of McClure's Magazine with articles by Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker (1870–1946), and Ida Tarbell on municipal government, labour, and trusts. The best-known muckraking novel is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).