|9780822958079|Portrait of a Muckraker| In this first definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, Kathleen Brady has written a readable and widely acclaimed book about one of America’s great journalists. Ida Tarbell’s generation called her “a muckraker” (the term was Theodore Roosevelt’s, and he didn’t intend it as a compliment), but in our time she would have been known as “an investigative reporter,” with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. By any description, Ida Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States: admired, feared, hated. When her History of the Standard Oil Company was published,…

|9780822959120|The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart| The mystery stories and other popular fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) brought her wealth and fame, but she was much more than a writer. She was a well-known American, respected and loved during a time when few women achieved national influence.Her early life was conventional enough. Trained as a nurse, she met and married a physician, with whom she had three sons. She was living the stereotypical life of a young matron in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), when her husband’s investments evaporated during a stock market crash. She began writing as a…