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The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens A California Legacy book The first of the muckrakers, in the finest tradition of American journalism. Here, in what The Nation publisher Victor Navasky says “ought to be assigned reading,” is the autobiography of one of the world’s first celebrity journalists: Lincoln Steffens, a man whose writing was so notorious that President Theodore Roosevelt coined a term for it—muckraking. Rediscover a man Americans turned to not only for news but for humor and wisdom as well. Growing up in Sacramento, Steffens (1866–1936) was an editor at the New York Evening Post, and later at McClure’s Magazine. As popular as he was cantankerous, he brushed shoulders with presidents and corporate barons, tsars and dictators. His efforts to expose corruption took him all over the nation and on to Mexico, Europe, and the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where he made his famous proclamation, “I have seen the future, and it works!” He would later become disenchanted with communism, and eventually he returned to California, to feel again its “warm, colorful force of beauty” and to write what would become this best-selling memoir. Inspiring, entertaining, and lyrical, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens is the story of a brilliant reporter with a passion for examining the complex and contradictory conditions that breed corruption, poverty, and misery. |
| Thomas C. Leonard has published many books on the origins of modern American journalism, including The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting and News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press. He is a University Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism. | |
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© Heyday Books, 2006 |