Nellie Bly is a part of American folklore--a larger-than-life figure who beat Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg around the world. But traveling the circumference of the globe in seventy-two days is not the only reason she is noteworthy: she was a woman reporter in the male-dominated 1880s; her first-person writing style was uncommon in the newspapers of the period; her investigative methods were also atypical, but her experiences in factories, with the insane, and on the stage enabled her to write stories that caught the interest of the average person. Her articles not only increased circulation for her newspapers but also enlightened an ignorant public and helped initiate reforms.

Entering the world as Elizabeth Cochran, she was the third child of Michael Cochran's marriage to Mary Jane Kennedy. She was born and raised in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania, a town her father had founded. She learned to take...