David Graham Phillips rose later than usual on January 23, 1911, following a late night of editing the corrective proofs of his new short story for the Saturday Evening Post. “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise” was, like most of his stories, a scandalous one — this time about an unrepentant prostitute.
Phillips, who had just been heralded as “the leading American novelist” by H.L. Mencken, was carrying the final proofs that he intended to mail to the magazine as he left his building, the National Arts Club on Manhattan’s Gramercy Park.
And just steps away from his daily stop at the Princeton Club on the north side of the park at Lexington Avenue, Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a former violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, confronted him and yelled, “Here you go!” and rapidly shot him six times. Moments later, Goldsborough wailed, “Here I go!” before fatally shooting himself in the head.
Phillips, known for his striking white suits and chrysanthemum boutonnieres, had made enemies with nearly all of his writing, whether it was journalism or fiction — or the former masquerading as the latter. Whether it was a front page story or a novel, Phillips wrote to expose the worlds of business, finance and politics and complained that American novels at the turn of the century were “largely imitative of ideals and methods that are narrow and that are totally inadequate as a description of life as it is in America today.”
Read the rest here: https://timeline.com/graham-phillips-sullivan-act-817b5a3c6b23