Nellie Bly - Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings

PENGUIN CLASSICS

AROUND THE WORLD IN SEVENTY-TWO DAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS

NELLIE BLY was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864, in Cochrans Mills (formerly Pitts Mills), a small town about 40 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child she was called Pink after the color in which her mother most often dressed her. Later she dropped the nickname. She added an e to her surname when she enrolled in the Indiana State Normal School to study teaching. After financial troubles forced her to drop out after less than a year, Cochrane sought work to bolster her familys income and grew frustrated by the scarcity of job opportunities for women. In 1885, when the Pittsburg Dispatch ran a column entitled What Girls Are Good For that mocked women who sought work outside the home, she wrote an anonymous response so scathing it gained notice from the papers editor, who advertised for the author to reveal herself so he could hire her. She was encouraged to use a pseudonyma common practice for women writers at the timeand she took Nellie Bly, a misspelled reference to a song by Pittsburgh native Stephen Foster. Dissatisfied by the womens-page assignments she often received, she soon became a freelancer and traveled to Mexico with her mother to gain experience as a foreign correspondent. She moved to New York in 1887, where Joseph Pulitzers New York World offered her a job after she agreed to commit herself to the Womens Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island to write about the atrocious conditions there. The report aided attempts to reform mental health care, while also gaining Bly personal fame and inspiring imitators at rival newspapers. She went on to write about domestic servitude, political corruption, religious sects, baby-selling rings, swindlers, woman suffrage, anarchist and socialist movements, workers strikes, and women in combat. Her unconventional approach to reporting combined personal opinion and investigatory journalism. In 1889, she became a national figure when she traveled around the world faster than the hero of Jules Vernes popular novel Around the World in Eighty Days.

After several years at the World, Bly took a hiatus from writing. She married and became deeply involved in her husbands lucrative manufacturing business. She marketed the first steel barrels in America and filed several patent applications for inventions, including a stacking garbage can. But hired managers mishandled the companys finances and it spiraled into bankruptcy. She returned to journalism in 1912, when she began writing for the New York Evening Journal. She sailed for Austria days after World War I began and filed firsthand reports from the Russian and Serbian fronts. Her calls for aid to Austrians would complicate her return to America after the war. Back in the States, she wrote an advice column and continued her activist work, assisting orphans and the poor, but as women became more accepted as journalists, public interest in Bly and her work diminished. In 1922, she died of pneumonia in New York City at age fifty-seven.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN is the book critic for NPRs Fresh Air and a critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism. Corrigans literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, Im Reading! was published in 2005. Her new book, So We Read On, is about Americas enduring fascination with The Great Gatsby. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post Book World. In addition to serving on the jury for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges panel of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

JEAN MARIE LUTES is an associate professor of English and director of academics for Gender and Womens Studies at Villanova University. Her first book, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, was published by Cornell University Press in 2006.

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Around the World in Seventy-Two Days first published in the United States of America by The Pictorial Weeklies Company 1890

This edition with additional writings by Nellie Bly, an introduction by Jean Marie Lutes and a foreword by Maureen Corrigan published in Penguin Books 2014

Introduction copyright 2014 by Jean Marie Lutes

Foreword copyright 2014 by Maureen Corrigan

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ISBN 978-0-14-310740-8

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