author
Will Irwin
1873–1948
A lively early 20th-century journalist and author, he moved from newspaper reporting into muckraking, war coverage, and sharp writing about the press itself. His work captures a restless era in American public life with energy and curiosity.
5 Audiobooks
Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University
by Charles K. (Charles Kellogg) Field, Will Irwin
The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco
by Will Irwin
The Readjustment
by Will Irwin
The Picaroons
by Gelett Burgess, Will Irwin
About the author
Born in Oneida, New York, in 1873, Will Irwin studied at Stanford University and went on to work for newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Sun. He built a reputation as a vivid reporter and later became associated with the muckrakers, the writers who exposed social and political abuses in the early 1900s.
Irwin wrote on a wide range of subjects, from city life and journalism to war and public affairs. He is especially remembered for The City That Was, his account of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, and for The American Newspaper, a notable critique of the news business written from the inside.
He was also part of a literary partnership with novelist and journalist Inez Haynes Irwin, whom he married. By the time of his death in New York in 1948, he had left behind a career that linked frontline reporting, social criticism, and popular nonfiction.