Purposeful Martyr

DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS AND HIS TIMES -- Isaac F. Marcosson -- Dodd, Mead ($3).

Tall, handsome, dandyish David Graham Phillips was a man of mark in the days of four-inch collars and wicked "Interests." Even then his collars were higher, his crusading zeal hotter than most. Many a reader remembers well the fuss & fury roused by his expose of Senators DePew, Aldrich, Knox, Foraker, Platt et al. in a Cosmopolitan magazine series called "The Treason of the Senate." President Roosevelt, irked by this intrusion on what he considered his private hunting ground, first used his pet word "muckraker" in veiled denunciation of the author.

Hoosier birth (1867) gave Graham Phillips a natural bent toward politics and writing. College friendship with an ambitious young backwoodsman named Albert J. Beveridge settled him down, helped him choose the goal which he pursued with solemn fixity to his death. The years of reporting and editorial writing under the late great Editors Charles A. Dana and Joseph Pulitzer were a time of learning weapons, storing mental ammunition. As a friend afterward wrote, "He believed that more people would read intelligently and heed the warnings and lessons which he felt inspired to offer through the medium of novels, than they would through the medium of apparently more serious articles."

No artist, Reporter Phillips scorned temperament, worked hard and methodically at the writing of his novels-with-a-purpose. His vigorous treatment of timely subjects--sins of society, political corruption, plutocratic greed--stirred controversy, made him a best seller. He had finished 20-odd books when one day in 1911 a crazed violinist named Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough. who imagined the novelist had pilloried his sister in a story, pumped six bullets into Phillips' chest, abruptly ended this life-with-a-purpose.

Four years after Phillips' death there began to appear serially his last & best novel. Susan Lenox--Her Full and Rise. A frank narrative of a prostitute's career, it drew the fire of John S. Suinner and his Society for the Suppression of Vice and made Author Phillips something of a posthumous hero. But to millions of U. S. minds mention of Susan Lenox today brings only the name of Greta Garbo, starred last year in a Hollywood-garbled version of the story.

The Author. Two and a half years ago died Mrs. Carolyn Phillips Frevert, sister of Novelist Phillips. Named as her residuary legatee, with a bequest of $729,286, was a "tried and loyal friend," Isaac Frederick Marcosson, most famed Satevepost interviewer and writer. Writing at his best, Mr. Marcosson revives the memory of his friend in its most heroic proportions.

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