Bylines is the latest title from award-winning biographer Sue Macy.
Nellie Bly was a pioneering American journalist who lived by the belief
that "Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything."
This credo took her from humble origins in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania,
a town named after her father, to the most exotic cities around the
globe by the time she was 25.
Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864, in an age when many
women led unassuming lives. Her life would make people sit up and take
notice: When she wasn't making history herself, she was writing about
others who did. Rarely has anyone left a more detailed record of her
place in the world than Nellie Bly. In a very public life, she shared
her feelings and opinions through her writing and embraced the struggles
of all classes of Americans who were fighting for their rights.
The story of the two decades before and after the turn of the 20th
century was her story, and she wrote with a powerful pen. Her "stunt
journalism" included getting herself committed to an insane asylum for
women and circling the globe in a mere 72 days. She profiled leaders
from Susan B. Anthony to Eugene V. Debs, exposed corruption, and offered
her readers a travelogue that expanded their horizons, even as it made
the world a little smaller.
Her words live on even now, and Sue Macy's masterful biography invites
young readers into Nellie Bly's America, a country at a time of great
growth and social change.