1867–1911, American writer, b. Madison, Ind., grad. College of New Jersey (now Princeton), 1887. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati and New York City, rising to editorial rank on the New York World, for which he wrote until 1902. Phillips became noted as a muckraker and was famous as the author of a series of sensational articles exposing corruption in the U.S. Senate that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine (1906). He also wrote articles for the Saturday Evening Post and other journals of the period. Phillips's novels, powerful although often crude, deal with corruptive influences in society and general social problems, such as the status of women. Among them are The Great God Success (1901), The Conflict (1911), and Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917). Phillips was murdered by a young musician who accused him of having cast literary slurs on his family.

See study by A. C. Ravitz (1966); I. F. Marcosson, David Graham Phillips and His Times (1932).

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