Ida M. Tarbell

Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) was an American journalist and biographer, one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era. Born in the Pennsylvania oil region, where her father was an independent producer squeezed by Standard Oil, she graduated from Allegheny College, taught, and studied in Paris before joining McClure's Magazine, where her serialized lives of Napoleon and Lincoln built its circulation. The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) exposed the methods of the Rockefeller trust and contributed to its dissolution in 1911. She later wrote on tariffs, business and the lives of Elbert Gary and Owen Young, and an autobiography, All in the Day's Work (1939).