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Nellie Bly: Daredevil Reporter, Feminist. By Brooke Kroeger. (New York: Times, 1994. xxii, 631 pp. $27.5O, ISBN 0-8129-1974.)
At last Nellie Bly has been given a definitive biographical treatment by journalist Brooke Kroeger. As the author makes clear, Nellie Bly as not the first American woman reporter, but she was "one of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"; she is known for her pioneering "detective" and "stunt" journalism and investigative reporting in the leading sensationalist daily newspapers of her day. Kroeger's digging through newspapers, court records, and other archival sources results in an authoritative telling and correcting of the record of the like of Elizabeth Cochrane, the woman, and of Nellie Bly, the star reporter. It is the story of a...