Nellie Bly

Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is an 1890 book by journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, writing under her pseudonym, Nellie Bly. The chronicle details her 72-day trip around the world, which was inspired by the book, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. She carried out the journey for Joseph Pulitzer's tabloid newspaper, the New York World. In 1888, Nellie Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey. She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money ( 200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck. The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. 4] 5] To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match" in which readers were asked to estimate Nellie Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip. On her travels around the world, Nellie Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks. Nellie Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a monkey in Singapore.

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, Nellie Bly was renowned as America's first 'girl stunt reporter'. She was a pioneer of investigative journalism, including an exposé of patient treatment at a mental asylum and a travelogue from her record-breaking race around the world in emulation of Phileas Fogg. This volume, the only printed and edited collection of Bly's writings, includes her best-known works as well as many lesser-known pieces that capture the breadth of her career from her fierce opinion pieces to her remarkable World War I reporting.

Ten Days in a Mad-House is a book by newspaper reporter Nellie Bly. It was initially published as a series of articles for the New York World. Bly later compiled the articles into a book, which was published by Ian L. Munro in New York City in 1887. The book comprised Bly's reportage for the New York World while on an undercover assignment in which she feigned insanity at a women's boarding house, so as to be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum. She then investigated the reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island "Since my experiences in Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies. I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane"-Nellie Bly

"The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out." Twenty-three-year-old journalist Nellie Bly, describing New York City's most notorious mental institution, wrote those words in 1887 after getting herself committed to the asylum. After her release she wrote a shocking expose called Ten Days in a Madhouse, launching her career as a world-famous investigative reporter and helping to improve conditions at mental institutions across the United States. Her story is just as remarkable today as it was shen she wrote it. Soon to be a major motion picture. Newly designed and typeset by Waking Lion Press.

This is Bly's truly disturbing account (and expose) of a mental asylum to which Bly was committed after feigning insanity. Including graphic depictions as to the treatment of mental patients and their unsanitary surroundings, Bly's controversial 1887 expose reveals the scandal and brutality of mental health in the nineteenth century and the ease with which professionals were prepared to accept and treat mental "disorders".

"The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out." -Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) by Nellie Bly describes what happened when the author, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, went undercover and had herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. Bly's groundbreaking expos of abuses in the treatment of mental health patients, which was originally published as a series of articles, led to significant reforms in the mental health system. In 2015 the book was turned into a movie starring Caroline Barry and Christopher Lambert.