Lincoln Steffens Author:Justin Kaplan Steffens (1866-1936) -- one of the new breed of investigative journalists Teddy Roosevelt dubbed muckrakers -- was already a legend by the age of 28. As a New York reporter, this indulged only son of a prosperous California family (he was to spend his last years as a dissenter sage and magnet for revolutionaries only a few hundred miles from whe... more »re he was born), Steffens learned (under the tutelage ... More of Jacob Riis, as he himself was to become the mentor of John Reed) the realities of slum life, exploitation and corruption. It was an education and a revelation after three years away soaking up European culture, where he acquired classy manners (the ""gentleman reporter""), a well- tailored British wardrobe and an older wife, one of Ibsen's new women. (His second wife whom he married late in life was virtually a gift.) A fervid believer in gospel Christianity and the Golden Rule, Steffens wrote about society's wrongs with the expectation that the system could be changed by exposure and shame; he was eventually to become disillusioned, yet later he embraced the Russian Revolution (""I have seen the future and it works"") again with the same misguided evangelicism. Bemuse Steffens really was a hero (and right now we desperately need some models), one wants this book to work. But, curiously, the fault doesn't lie with the biographer (whose Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award). Despite the drama of the times (it was the heyday of Greenwich Village radical chic, anarchism, the labor movement, etc.) and Kaplan's compassion and skill, Steffens as a personality offers up little. He seems in reality not to have been an exciting or even particularly interesting man, which may explain why not much has appeared about him since his Autobiography of 1931. Throughout his life Steffens had been troubled by his inability to give affection, whereas he himself was always much loved. One is left wondering just what it was that people were responding to.« less