Today would be the 151st birthday of Nellie Bly, the pioneering journalist who lived fast, died too young, and was the foremother of a new and groundbreaking type of investigative reporting.
Bly’s best known for going undercover to investigate a psychiatric institution, faking mental illness to get inside. In her 57 years, she spent six months working in Mexico and traveled 25,000 miles around the world in 80 days for a story, before retiring from journalism, marrying a much-older man and becoming president of her own company. Here are some of the many highlights from her exceedingly ballin’ career.
“Nellie Bly” was the pen-named used by Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, the daughter of mill worker Michael Cochran and his wife Mary Jane. Her father died when she was in her teens, and she went first to Pittsburgh for work, landing at a paper called The Dispatch, where she earned $5 a week writing the genteel news of the time that was considered appropriate for lady journalists, mostly “society” stories and reviews of plays, although she also managed to write stories about working conditions for women
Eventually, Bly managed to land an assignment as the foreign correspondent in Mexico, spending half a year there and writing a book, factually titled Six Months in Mexico. Here’s a picture of Nellie in Mexico, looking regal as fuck:
At 20, after returning to Pittsburgh and once again being unwillingly saddled with fluff stories, Bly moved to New York and landed a job at the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s tabloid. She convinced Pulitzer to hire her by pitching an undercover exposé of the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. The result, “Ten Days in a Mad-house” was an instant sensation, specifically her descriptions of its grim conditions:
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