David Graham Phillips

The interests of David Graham Phillips (1867-1911), American journalist and novelist, ranged from the plight of women to corruption in Congress.

David Graham Phillips was born on Oct. 31, 1867, in Madison, Ind. During his happy and comfortable childhood he developed especially close ties to his older sister Carolyn. After high school Phillips entered Asbury (DePauw) University, where he roomed with the future U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge, a man whom Phillips considered a symbol of the success that can come from hard work. When Beveridge graduated, Phillips went to Princeton, where he received a degree in 1887.

After college Phillips began working on the staff of the Cincinnati Times-Star. He wrote for a succession of newspapers, culminating his newspaper career as editorial writer for the New York World. His first novel, The Great God Success (1901), published under the pseudonym John Graham, won acclaim from popular critics and encouraged him to leave the World in 1902 to devote himself to "serious" writing. From then on he worked long hours on a regular daily schedule, writing 22 more novels, a play, and a series of essays.

Many of Phillips's novels employ journalistic techniques to examine the "hidden" story behind a dramatic situation, but this often results in pasteboard characterizations. He was interested in a variety of social problems. In The Second Generation (1907) he contrasts the evils of inherited wealth with the virtues of the working class. The Plum Tree (1905), Light Fingered Gentry (1907), and The Conflict (1911) consider the corruption of power and money that accompanied the rise of American democracy. He dealt with the social and economic situation of women in Old Wives for New (1908), The Hungry Heart (1909), The Price She Paid (1912), and his best-known novel, Susan Lenox (1917), the story of the rise to success of an illegitimate country girl turned prostitute.

Phillips's essays exposing corruption and greed in Congress, "The Treason of the Senate" (1906), appeared in Cosmopolitan and immediately brought reactions from men in power. His work was called sensational and distorted, and he acquired the title of muckraker. But he had little taste for bucking public opinion and so returned to fiction.

On Jan. 23, 1911, Phillips was shot by a mentally ill violinist who believed that Phillips's novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909) had libelously portrayed his family. Phillips died the next day. His sister Carolyn, with whom he had lived for years, prepared his last works for posthumous publication.

Further Reading

Abe C. Ravitz, David Graham Phillips (1966), is biographical and evaluative. Kenneth S. Lynn's excellent The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination (1955) contains a chapter on Phillips. Isaac F. Marcosson, David Graham Phillips and His Times (1932), remains useful for its account of Phillips's journalistic work. Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939), describes the whole muckraking movement.

Additional Sources

Filler, Louis, Voice of the democracy: a critical biography of David Graham Phillips, journalist, novelist, progressive, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. □

Phillips, David Graham (1867–1911), born in Indiana, began his journalistic career at Cincinnati (1887) and moved to New York (1890), where he worked on the Sun and World. In 1902 he began to write muckraking magazine articles and fiction concerned with contemporary social problems. During the few years of creative work that followed, he wrote 23 novels, a play, and a book of essays. The novels, which show his training as a reporter as well as his muckraking zeal against fraud and oppression, include The Great God Success (1901); Golden Fleece (1903), dealing with the American adventures of a fortune‐hunting earl; The Master‐Rogue (1903), the autobiography of a modern Croesus; The Cost (1904) and The Deluge (1905), both exposing Wall Street manipulation; The Plum Tree (1905), about the operations of a political boss; Light‐Fingered Gentry (1907), a fictional treatment of recent insurance scandals; The Second Generation (1907), contrasting the evils of inherited wealth with the virtues of the hard‐working lower classes; and The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909), The Conflict (1911), and George Helm (1912), depicting respectively national, municipal, and state corruption. The remainder of his works deal with the contemporary interest in the “new woman.” Old Wives for New (1908), The Hungry Heart (1909), and his play The Worth of a Woman (1908) are concerned with the changed standards of women in love and marriage. The Husband's Story (1910) and The Price She Paid (1912) are novels treating respectively feminine social ambitions and the independence of the new woman. Phillips's greatest novel, Susan Lenox; Her Fall and Rise (1917), combines his previous themes in a muckraking exposé of Cincinnati slum life and New York political corruption, which serve as a background for the life of a country girl who reaches success through prostitution. The promise that Phillips showed in this work, published posthumously, was cut short when he was murdered by a lunatic.

David Graham Phillips 1867–1911, American writer, b. Madison, Ind., grad. College of New Jersey (now Princeton), 1887. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati and New York City, rising to editorial rank on the New York World, for which he wrote until 1902. Phillips became noted as a muckraker and was famous as the author of a series of sensational articles exposing corruption in the U.S. Senate that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine (1906). He also wrote articles for the Saturday Evening Post and other journals of the period. Phillips's novels, powerful although often crude, deal with corruptive influences in society and general social problems, such as the status of women. Among them are The Great God Success (1901), The Conflict (1911), and Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917). Phillips was murdered by a young musician who accused him of having cast literary slurs on his family.

Bibliography: See study by A. C. Ravitz (1966); I. F. Marcosson, David Graham Phillips and His Times (1932).