Authors Like Brooke Kroeger

The obvious first step and the right one: Kroeger's biography is the standard life, and Bly's own reports are short enough to read alongside it. What the biography gives you is context; what Ten Days in a Mad-House gives you is the voice — brisk, indignant and very aware of being a story herself. Read the two together and you see why Kroeger made the history of undercover work her subject.

The case that shows how much one undercover stint can change. Sinclair is the reminder that the method did not belong only to newspapers: he took reporting into fiction, and the fiction moved Congress. He is more of a polemicist than Kroeger's reporters, but the line from Bly to The Jungle is direct.

Orwell is the British branch of the tradition, and the most self-questioning: he is always asking what it means for an Old Etonian to sleep in a doss-house and then go home. That is Kroeger's question too — what a reporter owes the people whose lives they borrow — and Down and Out is where to watch someone work it out on the page.

The book where Kroeger's two big subjects meet: undercover reporting and passing. Griffin's method is the most extreme in this list and the most argued over — a white man telling white readers what Black Southerners already knew — and that argument is exactly what makes it worth reading after Kroeger.

Steinem's piece is one of the cases Kroeger discusses, and it belongs between her two books on women: an undercover story that is also about what a woman's work was worth in 1963. It is funny, precise about money and uniforms, and much less glamorous than its reputation.

If Kroeger's book leaves you wanting a single career built on the method, this is it. Wallraff made undercover reporting his whole career, and his books are more sustained than most American examples: months inside one institution, from a newsroom to a building site, written up in exhaustive detail.

The most-read undercover book of the last thirty years, and one Kroeger discusses. Ehrenreich is open about her safety net and her limits, which makes the book more honest than most in the genre; she is also much funnier than her subject should allow.

Kroeger's colleague and the best living practitioner of the long version of the method. Where Bly stayed ten days, Conover stays long enough to become the job, and Newjack is as much about what guarding does to the guard as about the prison. His Immersion (2016) is the how-to that pairs with Kroeger's history.

The clearest proof that the method still works and still matters. Bauer does what Kroeger argues the best undercover reporters do — uses the access to document what no records request would show — and then backs it with the archive. Read it next to Newjack: the same job, a public prison and a private one.

The undercover tradition turned inside out: here the people using false identities are the ones trying to keep a story hidden. That makes Catch and Kill a useful companion to Kroeger's argument about when deception is justified — and who else is using it.