Cover for TARBELL: All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography. Click for larger image

All in the Day's Work

An Autobiography

As one of the original 13 muckrackers and the only women, and the first woman on McClure’s staff, Ida Tarbell continues to be viewed as one of America’s most important women and journalists.

In this frank and informative autobiography, the veteran investigative journalist Ida M. Tarbell looks back on her nearly fifty-year career. At the age of eighty-two, one of the original muckrakers writes with her characteristic candor about a life spent defying categories and challenging complacency. Tarbell was the only woman in her class of forty students at Allegheny College, and upon graduation she began an internship at The Chautauquan, which was the start of a lifelong immersion in the world of journalism. She further honed her skills during a three-year stint in Paris, but the breakthrough came in 1894 when she was hired as a full-time writer for McClure's magazine. It was at McClure's--where, again, she was the only woman on staff--that Tarbell made her name as a determined journalist, one of the fearless brigade of truth-seekers famously chastised by Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term ‘muckraker' in order to discredit those who attacked senators in print. Tarbell wrote serialized biographies of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, as well as a landmark series of articles on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller. In All in the Day's Work, Tarbell turns her keen eye on herself, recalling the events of her fascinating life with the same honesty, verve, and scrupulous accuracy she brought to her journalistic work, offering insight along the way into the people, places, and issues of her time.

Related Titles

previous book next book
Political Writings

Simone de Beauvoir

Rebels and Runaways

Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida

Larry Eugene Rivers

The Black Chicago Renaissance

Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr.

Saving the World

A Brief History of Communication for Development and Social Change

Emile G. McAnany

Ghost of the Ozarks

Murder and Memory in the Upland South

Brooks Blevins

Pacific Citizens

Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Greg Robinson

The 1933 Chicago World's Fair

A Century of Progress

Cheryl R. Ganz

The Genius and the Goddess

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

Jeffrey Meyers

Live Fast, Love Hard

The Faron Young Story

Diane Diekman