Lincoln Steffens – 1866-1936

Journalist and social critic Steffens was among the writers President Theodore Roosevelt called “muckrakers,” using a term borrowed from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegorical classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, among whose characters is a “Man with the Muckrake… who could look no way but downward.” The term also took on a positive connotation to describe writers who exposed social corruption and injustice. Steffens’s 1906 The Shame of the Cities exposed the widespread corruption of urban politicians and fueled many of the reforms of the Progressive era in American politics.