author
Lincoln Steffens
1866–1936
A leading muckraker of the Progressive Era, he helped change American journalism by exposing how city politics really worked. His reporting was sharp, readable, and aimed at the everyday systems of corruption that shaped public life.
1 Audiobook
The Shame of the Cities
by Lincoln Steffens
About the author
Born in California in 1866, Lincoln Steffens became one of the best-known investigative journalists in the United States. He studied both in the U.S. and Europe before building a career in newspaper and magazine journalism, eventually becoming a key figure at McClure’s Magazine.
Steffens is best remembered for reporting on political corruption in American cities. His articles were later gathered in The Shame of the Cities (1904), a book that helped define the muckraking tradition and showed how bribery, political machines, and public apathy could work together. Rather than treating corruption as a handful of isolated scandals, he pushed readers to see it as a broader civic problem.
Later in life, he remained deeply interested in politics and social change, and his views grew more radical after witnessing revolutionary movements abroad. He died in 1936, but his work still stands as an early model of investigative reporting that tried not just to reveal wrongdoing, but to make readers think about how democracy should function.