When such a manuscript also casts a controversial light on well-established historical events, a naturally sceptical reading audience is entitled to know how its discovery came about. In June 1976 I completed my doctoral dissertation on the little-known American novelist David Graham Phillips. Although few people today even recognise Phillips’ name, many are quite familiar with the title of “Muckraker,” which an angry President Theodore Roosevelt pinned on him for the writer’s attack on members of the United States Senate in 1906. My particular interest in Phillips focused on the dichotomy in his nature that resulted, on the one hand, in the kind of political dissent that so enraged Roosevelt and, on the other, the eccentric and stylish mode of dress that earned Phillips the label of “dandy.” My dissertation, entitled “The Muckraker and the Dandy: The Conflicting Personae of David Graham Phillips,” studied the impact of this psychological split on Phillips’ fiction, fiction that, at least during his own lifetime, garnered him comparisons to Tolstoy, Balzac, and Dickens.
