ABSTRACT
US literary “muckraking” is a narrative form that periodically arises in times of socio-economic and political crisis. (The gender-neutral “muckraker” was bestowed on investigative journalists by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, when he referenced a dour character in the well-known allegory, John Bunyan’s 1678 Pilgrim’s Progress.) Produced in fiction and nonfiction, literary muckraking has been principally identified with its c.1900s concentration of articles in McClure’s Magazine and its association with such journalists as Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker. The genre arose in the late 1800s Gilded Age and continued in the 1930s Depression, thereafter succeeded by the 1960s years of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and feminist movements. The genre continues in the early twenty-first century marked by crises of healthcare, income inequality, technological domination, immigration brutalities, and environmental jeopardy. Twenty-first-century literary muckrakers include Sheri Fink, Beth Macy, and Jessica Bruder, among others. The precedent for their lengthy exposés is Ida Tarbell’s magisterial History of the Standard Oil Company, which is replete with facts and buoyed by the strong storyline.
