Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) was an American journalist and author. He launched his career as a journalist in 1892 with the Chicago News-Record, where he covered the Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army in 1893. In 1898, he joined the staff of McClure's, a pioneer muckraking magazine, and quickly rose to prominence along with Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. He also dabbled in fiction, writing children's stories for the magazine Youth's Companion and a nine-volume series of stories about rural living in America, the first of which was titled Adventures in Contentment under the pseudonym David Grayson. In 1906, Baker, Steffens and Tarbell left McClure's and created American Magazine. In 1908, he wrote the book Following the Color Line, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide.