Books written by
The journalist and NYU professor who keeps rescuing forgotten women from the footnotes of American media history
Brooke Kroeger spent years as a UPI and Newsday reporter before turning to books, and it shows: her biographies read like investigations, not tributes. She wrote the first fully documented biography of Nellie Bly, spent a decade researching the history of undercover reporting, and in 2023 published a sweeping account of two centuries of women fighting for a place in American newsrooms.
Below is her bibliography in order, with my honest take on each one, a quick-facts box, and a recorded talk in which she discusses the woman she’s most associated with. If Nellie Bly’s story interests you, I’ve also written a full Nellie Bly author page, which pairs naturally with Kroeger’s biography of her.
Sources: Wikipedia, brookekroeger.com, and contemporary reporting cited throughout. Last updated July 2026.
Brooke Kroeger is an American journalist and professor emerita at New York University, best known for Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994), the first fully documented biography of the pioneering reporter, and for Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (2023), a two-century history of women’s fight for equal standing in U.S. newsrooms. She has published six books in total, spanning biography, media history, and a study of “passing” across race, class, and identity.
“The maestra of the front-page sensation story.”
— Brooke Kroeger, describing Nellie Bly, in Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994)
Quick facts
Her best-known book
Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist
The first fully documented biography of Nellie Bly, built from court records, unpublished letters, and Bly’s own 600-plus newspaper and magazine articles. It traces her entire career, from feigning insanity to expose conditions at a New York asylum, to circling the globe in 72 days, to running her own steel-barrel manufacturing company. Named an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Kroeger was a working reporter and editor before she became a biographer, and it shows in how skeptically she handles Bly’s own self-mythologizing. This isn’t hagiography; it’s a reporter fact-checking another reporter, decades later, and mostly finding the legend held up. If you’ve read a shorter Nellie Bly retrospective online, this is the book those pieces are quietly drawing from.
Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst
A biography of Fannie Hurst, one of the best-selling and highest-paid American writers of the 1920s and 30s, whose novels (including Imitation of Life) were adapted into major Hollywood films, and who was largely forgotten by literary history within a few decades of her death.
This is Kroeger’s pattern across her career: find a woman who was genuinely famous in her own time and ask, seriously, why she disappeared from the record. Hurst’s fall from the canon is a useful case study in how quickly commercial success gets written out of “serious” literary history, especially for women.
Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are
Five life stories of people who “passed” as something other than what they were born or raised as — across race, class, religion, and sexual orientation — including a Black man who passed as a white Jew and a lesbian naval officer who passed as straight. The book asks what passing costs the people who do it, and what it reveals about the categories society insists on.
Broader in scope than her biographies, and more uncomfortable in a useful way — Kroeger refuses to flatten any of her five subjects into a simple lesson. Worth reading alongside more recent identity writing to see how the same questions looked two decades earlier, before “passing” became a much more mainstream topic in nonfiction.
Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception
A history and defense of undercover journalism, tracing the technique from Nellie Bly’s asylum exposé through decades of newsroom debate about whether deception is ever an acceptable reporting tool. Kroeger argues the practice deserves a more honored place in journalism than it currently holds.
This is essentially Kroeger returning to the Nellie Bly question eighteen years later with a bigger lens: not just “was Bly right to lie her way into an asylum,” but “when, if ever, is any journalist right to do that.” A useful read if you want the ethical argument rather than just the biography.
Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
A collection of essays on how the American press covered, distorted, and sometimes actively supported the women’s suffrage movement, and how suffragists in turn built their own media strategy to shape public opinion, published to mark the centennial of the 19th Amendment.
More academic in tone than Kroeger’s solo books, but it’s a direct throughline to Undaunted three years later — you can see her research here feeding into the bigger argument she’d go on to make about women, media, and power.
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
A two-century history of women fighting for equal standing in America’s most competitive newsrooms, from early “stunt girl” reporters through Ida B. Wells, Martha Gellhorn, and Joan Didion, to contemporary newsroom leadership. Reviewed as a major work of research in outlets including The Guardian.
This is Kroeger’s career-culminating argument: that the history of American journalism is inseparable from the history of women fighting to be allowed to practice it. If you’ve only read her Nellie Bly biography, this book puts that single story into the much larger pattern it was always part of.
Watch: Brooke Kroeger on Nellie Bly
A recorded talk Kroeger gave for the Empire State Center for the Book, via the Princeton Club of NYC, in which she covers Nellie Bly’s entire career and explains why the story still resonates more than a century later.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Brooke Kroeger?
Brooke Kroeger is an American journalist, author, and professor emerita at New York University. She previously worked as a reporter and editor for UPI and Newsday, and has written six books of biography and media history.
What is Brooke Kroeger’s most famous book?
Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994), the first fully documented biography of the pioneering journalist, named an NPR Best Book of the Year.
What is Brooke Kroeger’s most recent book?
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (2023), published by Alfred A. Knopf, which traces two centuries of women’s struggle for equal standing in American newsrooms.
Is Brooke Kroeger still writing?
Yes. Beyond Undaunted in 2023, she published a chapbook, A Journalist at War, in 2025, and has written introductions to reissued works by earlier women journalists, including Elizabeth L. Banks and Elizabeth Garver Jordan.
Did Brooke Kroeger write about Nellie Bly more than once?
Yes. Her 1994 biography, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, was her first book. She returned to the subject of undercover journalism, which Bly pioneered, in her 2012 book Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception.
What is Brooke Kroeger’s book Passing about?
Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (2003) tells five true stories of people who passed as something other than their actual race, class, religion, or sexual orientation, examining what passing costs the people who do it.
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Written by Lisanne Swart
Lisanne curates books for curious readers at lisannewart.com, publishing original reading lists, author deep-dives, and honest recommendations since 2021. Read more about Lisanne.
