kPARA cPAR@ ` πTEXT ` ╒Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether
1870╨1951
journalist
Born near Woodstock, Tennessee, on November 18, 1870, Elizabeth Meriwether received little in the way of formal schooling before her marriage in November 1888 to George O. Gilmer. A short time later he fell victim to incurable mental illness and was incapacitated until his death in an asylum in 1931. Forced to seek her own support, Gilmer suffered a nervous collapse. During her convalescence she began writing stories and sketches of life in her native region. In 1896 one of them attracted the notice of a neighbor, Eliza P. Nicholson, owner of the New Orleans Picayune, who gave her a job as a reporter. Following the custom of women reporters in writing under an alliterative pseudonym, she chose the name ╥Dorothy Dix╙ and began writing a Sunday advice column for women under the title ╥Sunday Salad.╙ The column was a remarkable success, and in a short time Gilmer became editor of the women╒s department and assistant to the editor of the Picayune. In 1901 she accepted a lucrative offer from William Randolph Hearst to move to his New York Journal. She continued her column, now called ╥Dorothy Dix Talks,╙ on a thrice-weekly basis while working also as a reporter specializing in ╥sob-sister╙ coverage of sensational murder stories.
Among the celebrated cases and trials Gilmer covered were the Nan Patterson trials in 1904 and the Harry Thaw╨Stanford White murder and trial in 1906. In 1917 she left Hearst to join the Wheeler Syndicate in order to devote full time to her column, which interested her far more than did sob-sister reporting. Publishing six times weekly, she began devoting half her columns to printing actual letters from readers seeking advice; the other three continued to be her own sermonettes. At the peak of her popularity she received upwards of 2000 letters a week from readers. Her only real challenger in the field was ╥Beatrice Fairfax╙ (Marie Manning). She moved her column to the Ledger Syndicate in 1923 and to the Bell Syndicate in 1933, and by 1940 it was appearing in 273 newspapers and being read by an estimated 60 million people in the United States and several foreign countries. She continued to write it until World War II. She also published several books: Mirandy, 1914, Hearts ê la Mode, 1915, Mirandy Exhorts, 1922, My Trip Around the World, 1924, and, based on her column, Dorothy Dix, Her Book, 1926, and How to Win and Hold a Husband, 1939. She died in New Orleans on December 16, 1951.
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