1907. American writer, Phillips worked as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati and New York City, rising to editorial rank on the New York World, for which he wrote until 1902. He became noted as a muckraker and was famous as the author of a series of sensational articles exposing corruption in the U.S. Senate that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. Phillips's novels, powerful although often crude, deal with corruptive influences in society and general social problems, such as the status of women. He came to an untimely death when he was murdered by a young musician who accused him of having cast literary slurs on his family. The story begins: Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it was cool, and even murmurously musical. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.