Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) was an American journalist and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era. Raised in Sacramento and educated at Berkeley and in Germany, he worked as a reporter in New York and became managing editor of McClure's Magazine, where his articles on corruption in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and other cities were collected as The Shame of the Cities (1904). He later investigated state governments and followed revolutions in Mexico and Russia, of which he wrote that he had seen the future and it worked. His Autobiography (1931) was widely read.