Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of May 5th
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It is the 125th day of the year, leaving 240 days remaining in 2022.
On this date in 1864, the crusading journalist Nellie Bly was born as Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Cochran's Mills, Pa.
Bly began her career at The Pittsburgh Dispatch after impressing an editor with her writing skills when she penned a letter condemning an article in the paper on the topic What Girls are Good For. She later moved on to the New York World.
It was while working for The World that Bly began reporting her best known work. She managed to check herself into the asylum in New York City, on what is now known as Roosevelt Island, by pretending to be insane.
Her reporting -- published in The World and a book, Ten Days in a Mad House -- of the butality and neglect in how she and the other patients were housed, treated, and cared for had immediate ramifications. A grand jury investigation led to improvements in the sub-standard conditions.
Bly used similar means to investigate and report on similar conditions in sweatshops and jails. She exposed bribery by lobbyists in the state legislature.
Such investigations brought her fame. She then went on a trip to try to beat Phileas Fogg's feat in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days.Riding ships, trains, horses, rickshaws, and other modes of transportation, she managed to cover the world in 72 days, six house, 11 minutes and 14 seconds -- all while writing it up for The World.
Bly died in 1922 in New York.
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