Around the World with Nellie Bly is the story of one of America's earliest and best girl reporters.

Nellie Bly was the pen name used by Elizabeth Cochrane, a Pennsylvania girl, who stirred up a whirlwind with her articles in the Pittsburgh Dispatch and later the New York World.

Nellie was absolutely fearless. Soft-spoken and rather pretty, she had beneath her feminine charm the heart of a lioness. In the 1880's and 90's when no young lady was supposed to go anywhere unchaperoned, Nellie investigated the lowest slums and sweatshops to get material for her exposés. She toured revolution-torn Mexico. Pretending insanity, she had herself locked up in New York's most notorious insane asylum, where for ten terrible days she lived the life of the unfortunate inmates. Her story of that adventure rocked New York and partially reformed the treatment of the insane.

Nellie's most exciting newspaper stunt was to encircle the planet in a mad dash calculated to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, fictional hero of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Catching ships and trains by a matter of minutes and weathering epidemics and typhoons, Nellie outraced Fogg by eight full days and returned to America a heroine, greeted everywhere with parades and masses of flowers, speeches and brass bands.

This book is Nellie's breathless story.

From the dust jacket

 

Young women encircle the globe these days in jet planes, often without a traveling companion. But when daring Nellie Bly set for on November 14, 1889, to better if she could the record of Phileas Fogg, she immediately became a national sensation.

Could this fearless girl reported go around the world in less than eighty days? What would she wear? What would she carry in the way of luggage? What route would she take? How would she manage to make herself understood in "heathen" countries that spoke no English? And what was her mother thinking of to let her go?

Emily Hahn recaptures the humor and excitement of Nellie's journey, which in its day was quite as thrilling to the public as any launching of a moon rocket or intercontinental missile might be today. Here is a period story which is quaintly romantic, wryly amusing, and very readable. 

Sterling North
General Editor

From the book