Educated at Alleghany College, Tarbell began teaching science at the Ohio Poland Union Seminary in 1880.Her interest in writing led her to abandon her teaching career and she began to contribute articles to The Chautauquan, a teaching supplement periodical of which she eventually became managing editor. In 1891, she moved to France and began writing articles for various magazines and landed a position as editor for the newly-established McClure's Magazine. Her series of articles on Abraham Lincoln firmly established her writing credentials, eventually leading to publication in book form in 1900. In 1904, she published The History of the Standard Oil Company, an expose which had appeared as a series in McClure's, and which was an impressive piece of investigative reporting. The book was influential in the later anti-trust case against the company. Theodore Roosevelt would later coin the phrase "muckraking" to describe Tarbell's form of journalism. In 1906, she was one of the founding members of American Magazine, a radical periodical that she would edit until its demise in 1915. She then toured the lecture circuit and purchased a farm at Redding Ridge in Connecticut which would be her home for the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia at the age of 86. Her other works include Madame Roland (1896), Tariff in Our Times (1911), The Business of Being a Woman (1912), Ways of Woman (1915), New Ideals in Business (1916), Rising of the Tide (1919), In Lincoln's Chair (1920), Peacemakers (1922), Owen D. Young (1932) and her autobiography, All in the Day's Work (1939). |
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