Reading List

Authors Like Nellie Bly

In 1887 a twenty-three-year-old reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World feigned insanity well enough to be committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. Her report ran on 9 October and became the book Ten Days in a Mad-House the same year. Nellie Bly — born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in western Pennsylvania in 1864, her pen name taken from a Stephen Foster song — had got her first newspaper job in 1885 by answering a Pittsburgh Dispatch column called “What Girls Are Good For”. In November 1889 she set off to beat Phileas Fogg's eighty days and was back in New York just over 72 days later. Readers come to her for the nerve, for the brisk, indignant voice, and for the method: the institution seen from inside by someone who was never supposed to be there. The writers below either use that method — the borrowed name, the taken job — or share her other inheritance: the reporter, often a woman, who goes after what powerful people would rather keep hidden.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Undercover reporting · Muckraking · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Nellie Bly, start with Brooke Kroeger, whose biography is the standard life and whose later book is the history of the method Bly made famous. For her own era, read Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell, the two other great women reporters of the 1890s and 1900s. For Ten Days in a Mad-House done again, Barbara Ehrenreich in low-wage America and Ted Conover as a guard at Sing Sing.

10 authors like Nellie Bly

01
Bly's biographer · Closest match

Brooke Kroeger

American · b. 1949 · Biographer and journalist

Kroeger spent eleven years at United Press International, as bureau chief in Tel Aviv and chief editor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, before writing Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994), which NPR named one of the best books of that year. Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012) is a history of journalists who hid who they were to get a story, published with a searchable database built with NYU Libraries, where she taught from 1998 to 2021. Her most recent book is Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (2023).

The natural next step, and two books in one. The biography fills in everything Bly left out of her own reports — the family, the money, the late marriage and the factory — and Undercover Reporting puts the asylum story at the head of a long line of reporters who lied their way in. Read it to see Bly as the start of a tradition rather than a one-off stunt.

— Lisanne

Every book by Brooke Kroeger →

02
Her contemporary · Reporting at the risk of her life

Ida B. Wells

American · b. 1862 · Journalist

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. On 27 May 1892, after she published an editorial challenging the claim that lynching protected white women, a mob destroyed the paper's office while she was in Philadelphia and threatened her if she returned. She published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that year and The Red Record in 1895. In 2020 the Pulitzer board gave her a posthumous special citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans”.

Wells and Bly were working at the same moment and could hardly have had different conditions. Bly's risk was ten days in an asylum; Wells reported on lynching in the South knowing she could be killed for it, and had to keep doing it from the North. Her pamphlets have the same cold fury and the same instinct for documentation, set against a far larger injustice.

— Lisanne
03
The other side of muckraking

Ida Tarbell

American · b. 1857 · Journalist and historian

Tarbell grew up in the Pennsylvania oil region, where her father's business was hurt by the South Improvement Company scheme of the early 1870s that linked the railroads to the larger oil interests. Her investigation of John D. Rockefeller's company ran in nineteen instalments in McClure's from November 1902 and was published as The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904; it contributed to the break-up of Standard Oil. She disliked Theodore Roosevelt's label “muckraker” and answered it in an essay called “Muckraker or Historian”.

If Bly is the reporter who goes inside, Tarbell is the one who reads every document. There is no disguise in her work, only years of court records and testimony, but the target is the same: an institution that thinks nobody will look. Reading the two together shows the two methods that investigative journalism still runs on.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ida Tarbell →

04
The stockyards, from inside

Upton Sinclair

American · b. 1878 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1943

In 1904 the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason sent Sinclair to Chicago, where he spent several weeks working undercover in the meatpacking district; he turned it into The Jungle, published by Doubleday in 1906. The public outcry over its descriptions of the plants helped bring about the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act that year. He later wrote: “I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth.

Bly's asylum report forced the city to spend more on its patients; Sinclair's stockyards changed federal law. He is the proof that the undercover method can work as fiction too, though he is more of a preacher than Bly — the reporting is buried inside a novel about a Lithuanian family, and the politics are loud. Read it for what it saw.

— Lisanne

Every book by Upton Sinclair →

05
Eleven days as a Bunny

Gloria Steinem

American · b. 1934 · Journalist and activist

In 1963 Steinem worked for eleven days at Hugh Hefner's New York Playboy Club under the name Marie Ochs, using her grandmother's name and Social Security number, and wrote it up in two parts for Show magazine as “A Bunny's Tale”. The piece helped end the clubs' practice of giving applicants physical examinations. She went on to co-found Ms. magazine in 1972, counted the Bunny piece among her achievements in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), and died in New York in September 2026.

The most direct descendant of Bly in tone: a young woman reporter, an assumed name, a short stay in an institution built on how women are handled, and a report that is very funny about it. Steinem is sharper on money — the pay, the deductions, the costume — and the piece reads as a feminist argument made entirely out of detail.

— Lisanne

Every book by Gloria Steinem →

06
The most extreme disguise

John Howard Griffin

American · b. 1920 · Journalist and novelist

In the autumn of 1959 Griffin, a white Texan writer, darkened his skin with medication and treatments and spent about six weeks travelling as a Black man through New Orleans and Mississippi, with side trips to South Carolina and Georgia, ending in Montgomery, Alabama. Sepia magazine paid for the trip in exchange for first publication; the expanded book, Black Like Me, was a bestseller in 1961. In his hometown of Mansfield, Texas, he was threatened and hanged in effigy, and the family moved to Mexico for a time.

The undercover book that asks the most of its method, and raises the hardest questions about it: a white man telling white readers what Black Southerners already knew. Like Ten Days in a Mad-House, it works because the reporter's shock is on the page, and it is worth reading with that limitation in mind.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Howard Griffin →

07
A whole career undercover

Günter Wallraff

German · b. 1942 · Reporter

Wallraff has built his career on false identities, joining the group he is investigating so that he is not recognised as a journalist. Der Aufmacher (1977) came from working inside the tabloid Bild; for Ganz unten (1985; in English Lowest of the Low) he posed as a Turkish guest worker called Ali and recorded how employers, landlords and officials treated him. His 2009 undercover film on racism, for which he wore blackface, was criticised as itself racist.

What Bly did for ten days, Wallraff has done for decades. He goes further than she did — months inside one workplace, often at physical cost — and his books are more systematic than hers, but the instinct is identical: become the person the institution mistreats, and write down exactly what happens.

— Lisanne

Every book by Günter Wallraff →

08
Undercover in low-wage America

Barbara Ehrenreich

American · b. 1941 · Journalist and essayist

For Nickel and Dimed (2001) Ehrenreich spent three months in minimum-wage jobs, including waitress, hotel housekeeper and Wal-Mart associate, to find out whether a person could live on that pay; she concluded that it took at least two jobs to cover food and rent. Bait and Switch (2005) tried the same with the white-collar job search. She won the Erasmus Prize in 2018 and died in 2022.

The best-known modern book in Bly's line, and the one with the same mix of outrage and comedy. Ehrenreich is more open than Bly about the safety net she never lets go of, which makes the experiment more honest, and she turns what she finds into an argument about wages rather than a single scandal.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Ehrenreich →

09
Immersion, for a year

Ted Conover

American · b. 1958 · Reporter · National Book Critics Circle Award 2000

Conover's first book, Rolling Nowhere (1984), came from riding freight trains with tramps; Coyotes (1987) followed Mexican migrants across the border. Refused permission to shadow prison staff as a journalist, he applied to be a corrections officer, was hired in 1997 and spent nearly a year at Sing Sing; Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a Pulitzer finalist. Immersion (2016) is his guide to the method.

Bly went into the asylum as a patient; Conover went into the prison as a guard, and stayed long enough to become the job. Newjack is as much about what the institution does to the people who run it as to the people inside — the side of the asylum that Bly could only watch from her bench.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ted Conover →

10
The private prison, from inside

Shane Bauer

American · Reporter

Bauer was held in Iran for more than two years after he and two companions were arrested by Iranian border guards in July 2009; they were released in September 2011. As a Mother Jones reporter he later took a job as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America, and expanded the story into American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (2018), which alternates his months inside with the history of prisons run for profit.

The closest thing now to Ten Days in a Mad-House: a reporter takes a job inside an institution that does not let journalists in, and writes down what it does to the people held there. Bauer adds what Bly never had room for — the archive behind the abuses — and the result reads as both exposé and history.

— Lisanne

Every book by Shane Bauer →

Where to start if you loved Nellie Bly

If you want the woman behind the stunts, read Brooke Kroeger.

Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist: the standard life, asylum to factory floor.

If you want her era, read Ida B. Wells.

Southern Horrors: the same year as Bly's fame, at far greater risk.

If you want Ten Days in a Mad-House now, read Shane Bauer.

American Prison: a reporter inside an institution built to keep reporters out.

If you want it with jokes, read Gloria Steinem.

“A Bunny's Tale”: eleven days, an assumed name, and every deduction from the pay.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Nellie Bly

Who should I read if I love Nellie Bly?

Brooke Kroeger first, for the standard biography and her history of undercover reporting. For Bly's own era, read Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell. For the undercover method in later hands, read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Gloria Steinem's “A Bunny's Tale”, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, Günter Wallraff's Ganz unten, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Ted Conover's Newjack and Shane Bauer's American Prison.

What books are like Ten Days in a Mad-House?

Books in which a reporter enters an institution under a false identity and reports what happens: Shane Bauer's American Prison (2018) and Ted Conover's Newjack (2000), both by reporters who worked as prison guards; Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), on low-wage work; and Günter Wallraff's Ganz unten (1985), on the treatment of Turkish workers in Germany.

What is the best biography of Nellie Bly?

Brooke Kroeger's Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994) is the standard biography. It covers the asylum report of 1887, the trip around the world in 1889–90, her marriage to the manufacturer Robert Seaman and the years she spent running his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company after his death.

How long did Nellie Bly take to go around the world?

Just over 72 days. She left on 14 November 1889 and arrived back in New York on 25 January 1890, beating the eighty days of Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg. Elizabeth Bisland of Cosmopolitan raced her in the opposite direction. Bly's account was published in 1890 as Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.

Where was the asylum in Ten Days in a Mad-House?

The Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York's East River, now Roosevelt Island. Bly feigned insanity to get herself committed there in 1887 for the New York World, and her report was published on 9 October that year.

Did Nellie Bly write fiction?

Yes. Besides her reporting she wrote The Mystery of Central Park (1889) and a series of serial novels for the New York Family Story Paper between 1889 and 1895, including Eva the Adventuress. The serials were thought lost until they were rediscovered in 2021.

Footnotes

  1. Nellie Bly — Wikipedia
  2. Brooke Kroeger — NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
  3. “A Bunny's Tale” — Undercover Reporting database, NYU
  4. Ida B. Wells Honored with Posthumous Pulitzer — Equal Justice Initiative
  5. Ida Tarbell — Wikipedia
  6. Ted Conover — Wikipedia
  7. Günter Wallraff — Wikipedia
  8. Upton Sinclair — Biography.com

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Author guide

Every Nellie Bly Book

Reports, travel book and novels, in order.

Authors like

Authors Like Brooke Kroeger

Who to read after Undercover Reporting.

Authors like

Authors Like Barbara Ehrenreich

Who to read after Nickel and Dimed.

Reading list

Best Investigative Journalism Books

The wider shelf this belongs to.

From the bookshelf

More writers worth your time.

If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.

Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations
Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!