The Grain of Dust

by David Graham Phillips

Dorothea Hallowell is a clerk in a New York law office. She's hard working and pleasant, but she has an undeserved reputation for being rather loose. It's nothing but office gossip -- and still, she becomes fed up with. If she's going to be treated like that, she ought at least to reap the rewards of it. . . . So she allows Frederick Norman, a lawyer in the office and a married man, to pursue her. But what she finds in the end is not the vicarious giddiness that she thought she'd feel -- quite the contrary, it's something much more sinister. . . .Excerpt from The Grain of A NovelInto the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman, corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the most important and most famous - radical orators often said infamous - in New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde - tawny hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave the impression of a young person of the feminine gender - that, and nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged. Perhaps in these respects - in neatness and taste - she did excel the average, which is depressingly low.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1911

About the author

David Graham Phillips was an American novelist and journalist of the muckraker tradition.Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana. After graduating from high school, Phillips entered Asbury College (now DePauw University) - following which he received a degree from Princeton University in 1887.

After completing his education, Phillips worked as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati, Ohio, before moving on to New York City where he was employed as a reporter for The Sun from 1890 to 1893, then columnist and editor with the New York World until 1902.

In his spare time, he wrote a novel, The Great God Success, that was published in 1901. The royalty income enabled him to work as a freelance journalist while continuing to write fiction. Writing articles for various prominent magazines, he began to develop a reputation as a competent investigative journalist. Phillips' novels often commented on social issues of the day and frequently chronicled events based on his real-life journalistic experiences.

He was considered a Progressive and for exposing corruption in the Senate he was labelled a muckraker. Phillips wrote an article in Cosmopolitan in March 1906, called "The Treason of the Senate," exposing campaign contributors being rewarded by certain members of the U. S. Senate. The story launched a scathing attack on Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and brought Phillips a great deal of national exposure. This and other similar articles helped lead to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, initiating popular instead of state-legislature election of U. S. senators.