American writer, Phillips 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. He 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. Phillips's novels, powerful although often crude, deal with corruptive influences in society and general social problems, such as the status of women. He came to an untimely death when he was murdered by a young musician who accused him of having cast literary slurs on his family. In six minutes the noon whistle would blow. But the workmen - the seven hundred in the Ranger-Whitney flour mills, the two hundred and fifty in the Ranger-Whitney cooperage adjoining - were, every man and boy of them, as hard at it as if the dinner rest were hours away. On the threshold of the long room where several scores of filled barrels were being headed and stamped, there suddenly appeared a huge figure, tall and broad and solid, clad in a working suit, originally grey but now white with the flour dust that saturated the air, and coated walls and windows both within and without. Also see other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.