Born in Cochran Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, on May 5, 1867 (or perhaps 1865), Elizabeth Cochran (she later added the final ╥e╙) received scant formal schooling. She began her career in journalism in 1885 as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. It was on this paper that she began using the pen name ╥Nellie Bly,╙ from a popular Stephen Foster song. Her first articles, on conditions among working girls in Pittsburgh, on slum life, and on other similar topics, marked her as a reporter of ingenuity and concern. In 1886╨1887 she traveled for several months through Mexico, sending back reports on official corruption and the lives of the poor that caused her expulsion from the country; her articles were subsequently collected in Six Months in Mexico, 1888.
In 1887 she left Pittsburgh for New York City and went to work for Joseph Pulitzer╒s New York World. One of her first undertakings for that paper was to get herself committed to the asylum on Blackwells (now Welfare) Island by pretending insanity, in order to write an exposÄ of conditions among the patients. Her account, published in the World and later collected in Ten Days in a Mad House, 1887, precipitated a grand-jury investigation of the asylum and brought about some improvements in patient care. Similar reportorial exploits took her into sweatshops, jails (after pretending to shoplift), and the legislature (where she exposed bribery in the lobbyist system). She was far and away the best known woman journalist of her day.
The high point of her career in Pulitzer╒s sensational style of journalism began in November 1889 and ended in January 1890. During that period she traveled alone around the world by steamer, train, ricksha, and other commercial conveyances in the record time of 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, in a highly publicized attempt to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne╒s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. The resulting work, Nellie Bly╒s Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days, 1890, was her greatest success. In April 1895 she married Robert L. Seaman, a New York businessman 45 years her senior, and retired to private life. After his death in 1910 she attended to his business interests in Brooklyn for some years with slight success. In 1919 she returned to journalism with the New York Journal. She died in New York City on January 27, 1922.
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