Citizen Reporters

At the turn of the last century, during the height of the Gilded Age, two unlikely outsiders would join forces to change the face of American journalism. S.S. McClure was a poor Irish immigrant of boundless ambition, a brilliant editor with an eye for spotting talent who bent the New York media world to his will. Ida Tarbell, his star reporter, was a brainy adventurer who chafed against expectations at a historical moment when women were expected to get married and stay home. Together, along with a band of singular characters that included journalists Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker, fiction writers Rudyard Kipling and Willa Cather, and the poet A.E. Housman, they built a magazine whose legacy has an enduring place in the history of American letters.