Who was Nellie Bly?

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Cochran Seaman in 1864, and her life was brought to print by Brooke Kroeger. Bly was an American journalist famous for her trip around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional record set by Jules Verne, and her personal expose of an asylum.

Before Nellie Bly, there was no investigative journalism. She fell into journalism after writing an intense rebuttal to a piece called "What Girls are Good For." The editor of the piece enjoyed her passion so much he offered her a full-time position under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, a practice that was common at the time. She began by focusing on working women and the atrocious conditions they lived in. She served as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, fighting off the standard of the day which said that female reporters should write fashion columns. She left Mexico after being threatened with arrest.

Moving from Pittsburgh from New York, she talked herself into a job under Joseph Pulitzer and an undercover assignment as a patient suffering from insanity. After being committed, she experienced the atrocity firsthand. The food was inedible, "dangerous" patients were bound with rope, and the nurses were abusive and exploitative. Bly spent ten days in the asylum and later assisted the grand jury investigation into the asylum conditions.

That was the first thing that made Bly famous. The second was her trip around the world in under eighty days. A rival newspaper asked Elizabeth Bisland, another reporter, to do the same, traveling in the opposite direction, to beat both Bly and Philieas Fogg, the character created by Jules Verne. Bly traveled on steamships and along existing rail routes. Bly circumnavigated the globe in 72 days, mostly alone.

She took a brief break from reporting after marrying a millionaire, Robert Seaman, forty years her senior, but returned to journalism after his death, where she covered the Eastern European Front in World War I and the 1913 Suffragette parade. Bly died in 1922 from pneumonia.

The book by Kroegur explains all this and more. The accounts of Bly's life were sketchy, but Kroegur filled in the gaps with her own journalism experience and she draws a vivid account of the life of an unusual, determined woman.

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