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As time went on, the gaps in Steffens' thinking and the contradictions in his life became more obvious. In Europe, where he lived during the '20s, he continued to celebrate Communism while living on capitalist interest and stock-market profits. As always, he knew everyone of importance—young or old. In his Boston days there had been two Harvard protégés, Walter Lippmann and John Reed. In Paris there were Hemingway, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the early '30s in New York he frequented Mabel Dodge's radical-chic soirées. "His life is a charming enigma," said a newspaperman. "To great financiers he is a harmless radical; to radicals he is a harmless reactionary."
Steffens' first marriage, which ended with his wife's death in 1911, does not appear to have been happy. But at the age of 53, he wedded Ella Winters, a 21 -year-old British political-science student who bore him his first and only child, a son, a few months later. In 1931 he rescued himself from obscurity with his Autobiography, which became a Depression bestseller and a minor classic. The book recorded what Steffens called his "life of unlearning." But as Biographer Kaplan notes, the Autobiography is anything but a reliable source of information. With considerable kindness, he describes Steffens' book as a form of fiction through which the author at tempted to re-create himself.
Apart from those eight glorious years of early muckraking, Steffens' life does not easily admit sympathy. Its trajectory seems cold and predictable. It was full of talk about the promised land of Soviet socialism and full of theories about the betterment of the human species. But there is not much evidence that except in rhetoric the man ever warmly committed himself to practice, and like others at the time he was deluded enough to apologize for Stalin's purges. To Biographer Kaplan, the old Steffens is a sad figure, a "Moses in Red . . . living out his life on the near side of the future." His death at the age of 70 in 1936 was not badly timed. Three years more and he would have had to explain the promised land between the lines of the Hitler-Stalin pact.