Between the Covers

The journalist who inspired the term "muckraking" (thanks to an unflattering assessment from then-President Theodore Roosevelt, who was quoting John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress), Phillips was hailed by H.L. Mencken as "the leading American novelist." Among his major works were his first novel, The Great God Success and his final novel, the posthumously published Susan Lennox, about an unrepentant prostitute. He also achieved a measure of literary immortality in the manner of his death: he was assassinated by a musician from a prominent family who felt his kin were besmirched in Phillips's penultimate fictional work, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig.more