Nellie Bly

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Nellie Bly (1864–1922) was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A writer, inventor, and lifelong advocate for a variety of feminist causes, she came to national fame with a series of articles about abuses at the mental asylum on Blackwell Island, America’s first municipal mental hospital. Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), a collection of articles originally published in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, helped to change official mental health policies and pioneered a new form of investigative journalism. Bly also wrote a book about her record-breaking seventy-two-day journey around the world. After marrying successful manufacturer Robert Seaman, she became one of the country’s leading female industrialists and earned several patents for her inventions. She eventually returned to journalism, covering the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913 and reporting from Europe’s Eastern Front during World War I.