Queen of the Muckrakers: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford (1917-1996)

FAIN: FZ-231666-16

Carla Kaplan
Northeastern University (Boston, MA 02115-5005)

A book-length study of a social activist whose writing and organizing activities challenged the conventions of her age.

This is the first major book to examine the life, writing, and influence of Jessica Mitford, a woman who walked away from British aristocracy to eventually revitalize muckraking: one of the oldest forms of American narrative advocacy. Mitford’s three distinct life phases as a peer’s daughter, a communist, and a successful writer were all defined by dogged efforts to shed the precepts of her class and learn to empathize and identify with society’s least empowered. At the center of American civil rights struggles in Oakland, she crossed America’s intransigent color line, anticipating the “New Abolitionist” critique of race and prisons by two decades. Beginning with her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death, (an exposé of the funeral industry’s exploitation of the poor), Mitford’s writing re-introduced, and radicalized, Gilded Age ideas of civic responsibility in ways which continue to impact contemporary debates over social inequality, whistle blowing, and the ethics of writing.

Associated Products

Literature in the Public Interest -- Muckraking and American Realism (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Literature in the Public Interest -- Muckraking and American Realism
Author: Carla Kaplan
Abstract: This course, on the “long Twentieth Century” of American realism and muckraking will consider the American muckraking tradition, as a literary tradition, with particular attention to the ways in which muckraking writers have employed rhetorical and realist techniques to persuade readers and engage audiences. Our discussion will begin with the question of why slave narrators are not considered muckrakers, using “cultural work” as an analytical framing device, and continue with some of the earliest works of the accepted tradition of American muckraking, such as Nellie Bly’s “madhouse” exposé (1887), Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and the American muckrakers associated with McClure’s magazine: Upton Sinclair, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell. Attention to a second generation of mid-century muckrakers will begin with social protest works which expose social conditions but are considered far from muckraking; Fannie Hurst’s sentimental stories (1916; 1925) and Richard Wright’s classic work of realism, Native Son (1940). With those works as a backdrop, our reading will then track two very different social activists, Rachel Carson (widely credited with instigating the environmental movement) and radical writer Jessica Mitford (whose advocacy of working and poor people earned her the honorific “Queen of the Muckrakers”). Our reading will continue with more recent works of popular muckraking, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001), Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), and Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2009), and conclude with issues raised by the recent case of The WikiLeaks Files (2015).
Year: 2016
Audience: Undergraduate

Literature in the Public Interest -- Muckraking and American Realism (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Literature in the Public Interest -- Muckraking and American Realism
Author: Carla Kaplan
Abstract: This course, on the “long Twentieth Century” of American realism and muckraking will consider the American muckraking tradition, as a literary tradition, with particular attention to the ways in which muckraking writers have employed rhetorical and realist techniques to persuade readers and engage audiences. Our discussion will begin with the question of why slave narrators are not considered muckrakers, using “cultural work” as an analytical framing device, and continue with some of the earliest works of the accepted tradition of American muckraking, such as Nellie Bly’s “madhouse” exposé (1887), Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and the American muckrakers associated with McClure’s magazine: Upton Sinclair, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell. Attention to a second generation of mid-century muckrakers will begin with social protest works which expose social conditions but are considered far from muckraking; Fannie Hurst’s sentimental stories (1916; 1925) and Richard Wright’s classic work of realism, Native Son (1940). With those works as a backdrop, our reading will then track two very different social activists, Rachel Carson (widely credited with instigating the environmental movement) and radical writer Jessica Mitford (whose advocacy of working and poor people earned her the honorific “Queen of the Muckrakers”). Our reading will continue with more recent works of popular muckraking, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001), Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), and Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2009), and conclude with issues raised by the recent case of The WikiLeaks Files (2015).
Year: 2016
Audience: Graduate

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