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. . . . David Graham Philips was an American journalist and novelist. He had a reputation for being a muckracker, having written several articles on politics that offended both the Republican and Democratic parties. The Grain of Dust was made into a movie in 1928.

Author Biography

David Graham Phillips (1867 - 1911) was an American novelist and journalist of the muckraker tradition. 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.