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Youth's Companion & McClure's. Grown seasoned and successful as a reporter, Baker still yearned to write fiction. He wrote to the Youth's Companion to ask their requirements. The Companion, he was informed, wanted stories of irreproachable moral tone, with well-devised plots, which would not revive sectional bitterness between North and South, or between rich and poor. Baker began to write such stories, fast. Once, staying at home while his wife and baby went to Michigan, he sat in the half-darkened dining room on hot summer mornings, went nowhere, saw no one, did not answer the doorbell, and finished a five-part serial for the Companion in a week. He got $250 for it.
Encouraged, Baker wrote asking McClure's if they would be interested in a series on the Secret Service. Brilliant, ailing, dynamic S. S. McClure invited him to come to New York, sent him a pass on the New York Central. When he got there McClure had gone to Europe, but the editors took him to lunch, talked about books and articles, and let him savor "the most stimulating, yes, intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else." There, with such young associates as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, William Allen White, Lincoln Steffens, O. Henry, Jack London and Ida Tarbell, he became one of the "muckrakers" who made McClure's the most sensationally successful magazine of its time and a potent influence in U.S. history.
Action Portraits. American Chronicle is written without pretense or boasting. It contains no sensational anecdotes or personal disclosures. It is filled with authentic, undramatized accounts of a sensitive, scrupulous literary journeyman's life and with brilliant sketches of public men in action. Three of these sketches—of General Tasker Bliss and Commissioner Henry White at the Versailles Peace Conference, and of Marconi receiving the first transatlantic wireless message in Newfoundland —are models of their kind, written with the sense of history that makes both the characters and the moment live. The full-length portrait of Woodrow Wilson, whom Baker served at Versailles as the Peace Commission's press director, is masterly.