A Fresh Air (NPR) Best Book of the Year – 1994
Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist is the first and only fully documented biography of Bly and integrates a wealth of previously unknown information with a reporter’s zeal for the hard fact. It is the first attempt to give us this legendary figure in all her complexity: the most famous woman journalist of her day, an extraordinary American industrialist, and a compelling humanitarian. Hers is not only an inspiring personal tale, but the story of an exemplar of an age when American women were vigorously asserting their right–indeed, their need–to shape history itself.
From Chapter Four, “The World”:
“Bly would assay the universe through a special lens with her own peculiar tint, and the reader, seeing her name in the headline, knew he or she would be in for an excruciatingly detailed account of whatever she had encountered. How she approached the subject and how she felt about anything that came into her mind at the time, even the most extraneous details, were as essential to the telling as why she had reported the story in the first place. Unlike her unwitting heirs of the 1960s and 1970s, when the phrase New Journalism would come around again, it was not her wit or sarcasm or counter-culture stream-of-consciousness that delivered a ripe audience. It was her compassion and social conscience, buttressed by a disarming bluntness. There was no mind-splitting intellectual insight or noteworthy literary finesse. Bly simply produced, week after week, an uninhibited display of her delight in being female and fearless and her joy in having such an attention-getting place to strut her stuff. It was “gonzo” journalism cloaked in Victoriana. Even her detractors found her too astounding to ignore. . . .”
Read here for the rest of Alexandra Svokos’s program notes for the new opera premiered by Opera Philadelphia on September 21, 2023.
Read Morehttps://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/11/nellie-bly-blackwells-island/ “Behind Asylum Bars:” Nellie Bly Reporting from Blackwell’s Island. November 8, 2022 by Amber Paranick “Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could […]
Read More"... all before she was 25."
Read MorePresentation for the American Women Writers Museum, March 10, 2021:
Read MoreYoutube of presentation, for the Empire State Center for the Book via the Princeton Club of NYC, 18 March 2021:
Read More"Indira Naioo is joined by biographer Brooke Kroeger who beautifully reveals the background and accomplishments by this pioneer, investigative journalist, business leader and inventor."
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