Tarbell, Ida (Minerva) (1857–1944)

US journalist and historian, whose exposés of corruption in high places made her one of the most prominent ‘muckrakers’ in the USA. She was an editor and contributor to McClure's Magazine 1894–1906. Her explosive denunciation of John D Rockefeller's fortune-building methods in The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) sparked anti-trust reform. From 1906 to 1915, with other McClure's Magazine writers, she edited the American.

Tarbell was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, and educated at Allegheny College and the Sorbonne, Paris, France. She was associate editor of the Chautauquan magazine 1883–91. Her books include The Business of Being a Woman (1912) and The Nationalizing of Business (1936), on post-civil war economic growth. Her autobiography, All in a Day's Work, appeared in 1939.