Three years before Maggie appeared, social activist Jacob Riis published an unfaltering depiction of life in New York City with How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), a groundbreaking work of nonfiction and photography. Riis, who like Crane had a background in journalism, wrote a startling expose of the squalid existence of New York’s immigrant poor. Riis’s work, well-received from the start, had a tremendous impact on social policy. With its publication, officials recognized the appalling living conditions of many of the city’s residents and made tenement reform a priority on the political agenda. Theodore Roosevelt, at the time New York City’s police commissioner, called Riis “the most useful citizen of New York.”

Much of the emotional appeal of How the Other Half Lives arose from Riis’s unforgettable photographs of the extreme misery of people living in tenements. The pictures forced readers to confront head-on the staggering circumstances of large numbers of people in a manner that prose could not possibly convey. Riis’s explicit photographs allowed him to maintain a more subdued tone in his writing that lent credibility to his call for reform. The success of his work paved the way for Stephen Crane, who in many ways tried to replicate the photographic impact of How the Other Half Lives. Crane’s narrative style is often referred to as “imagistic,” and in Maggie, his first mature work, Crane compensates for a lack of actual images with his colorful, even lurid prose impressions.

Crane and Riis are associated with the tradition of American journalism known as “muckraking.” The loose term refers to journalists who wrote expose and reform stories in the period between the 1890s and World War I. Overly sensational, condescending, and truth-distorting accounts by some journalists lent muckraking a dubious reputation, although many writers made their cases for reform with integrity. Notable “muckraking” journalists include Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida Tarbell. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives inspired socialist-leaning author Jack London to write an analogous depiction of London’s East End, titled The People of the Abyss (1903).

Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) is singular among works of fiction for its positive effect on the real world. The novel’s horrifying descriptions of the unsanitary handling of food in Chicago’s meatpacking district caused public outrage, and the reality of rotten and diseased food being offered to consumers was confirmed by Chicago newspapers. In response to the furor caused by The Jungle, Roosevelt, who had become president of the United States, ordered the Department of Agriculture to investigate conditions in the stockyards, and Congress passed the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act just months after the novel’s publication.

The term “muckraking,” ironically, was coined as a pejorative by Roosevelt in 1906, more than a decade after he had praised Riis’s work. The word comes from John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (part I, 1678; part II, 1684), which refers to the Man with the Muck-rake: “the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” In coining the term in its modern application, Roosevelt meant to discourage the sort of reckless journalism that, rather than responsibly exposing injustices, attempted to increase circulation with negative stories dependent upon hyperbole and sensationalism—methods both Crane and Riis avoided. In signing the reform legislation, however, and in his praise of Riis, Roosevelt implicitly acknowledged the usefulness of ethical muckrakers.

Later “muckrakers” include civil-rights activist Angela Davis, feminist and political activist Gloria Steinem, Fast Food Nation (2001) author Eric Schlosser, and filmmaker Michael Moore, whose films include Roger & Me (1989), Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).