李观仪新编英语教程第五册unit 6 preparing for college

About the author
• The publication of Steffen's articles, in conjunction with the first chapters of Ida Tarbell's exposéof the Standard Oil Company, led to a sharp climb in McClure's circulation, and soon many other magazines were competing to boost their circulations by exposing the ills of American government. This type of writing was derided by President Theodore Roosevelt as "muckrake" journalism, and the term stuck. • Steffen's series, published as The Shame of the Cities (1940), became a best seller. Its popularity was well deserved, for Steffens's work stood far above most of the other muckraking exposé s of municipal corruption in terms of both literary style and intellectual perception. He was not interested in merely exposing corrupt bosses. Indeed, his affection for many of those colorful characters shows through in his work. He wanted to expose the pattern of corruption and the real villains, the supposedly respectable, honest businessmen whose bribes and greed fueled the whole system.
About the author
• When Steffens returned to New York in 1892, secretly married to an American girl he had met in Germany, he found a $100 check from his father and a note saying that this was the last subsidy. Steffens got a job as police reporter for the New York Evening Post. He soon became fascinated with the tangled web of corruption that ensnared the police department and municipal government in general. He wrote of this for the Evening Post in the 1890s, as did other journalists. But he became famous for this only in 1903, when, as an editor of McClure's Magazine(麦克 卢尔), he began a series of articles on corruption in various American cities entitled "The Shame of St. Louis," "The Shame of Minneapolis," and so on, which portrayed a pattern of shocking corruption in municipal government throughout the country.
Unit Six
Preparing for College
About the author
Lincoln Stef
• Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was the most famous of the American muckraker journalists(扒粪者 ）of the period 1903-1910. His exposé s of corruption in government and business helped build support for reform. • Lincoln Steffens was born on April 6, 1866, in Sacramento, Calif. The son of a wealthy businessman, he went to an expensive military academy where he began showing signs of the rebelliousness that would eventually lead him to political radicalism. After barely graduating from the academy, he went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he became convinced that the answers to the great questions of life and politics lay in the study of philosophy. Upon graduating in 1889, he continued his pursuit of "culture" in Europe, studying at universities in Germany and France.