Author Guide · Journalism
Books Written by
In September 1887 a twenty-three-year-old reporter took a room at a boarding house for working women on Second Avenue in New York, stayed up all night staring at the walls, and told the other lodgers she could not remember who she was. Within days a judge had sent her to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She was Nellie Bly, and the ten days she spent there became the first great American undercover exposé. Two years later she went around the world in seventy-two days to beat a character in a novel.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 books · Investigative journalism · Female authors · 1887–1890 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Nellie Bly published four books in her lifetime: Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), Six Months in Mexico (1888), the novel The Mystery of Central Park (1889) and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890). Eleven more novels she wrote for story papers in the 1890s were rediscovered and republished from 2021. Below: all of them, where to start, and how she worked.
Where to Start with Nellie Bly
If you have never read her
→ Ten Days in a Mad-House. Short, the book that invented her method, and still urgent more than 130 years later.
If you want the famous adventure
→ Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. Less about injustice, more about spectacle, and the book that made her a household name.
If you want her as a foreign correspondent
→ Six Months in Mexico. The reporting she did before anyone in New York knew her name.
If you want everything she published
→ The Mystery of Central Park. Her first novel, and then the eleven lost ones below it.
All 4 Nellie Bly Books, in Order
Ten Days in a Mad-House
Start hereIn the autumn of 1887 Bly feigned insanity in a boarding house for working women, convinced a judge and several doctors, and was committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York. For ten days she recorded what she found: ice-cold baths, spoiled food, nurses who beat and mocked patients, women tied together with ropes, and patients made to sit silent on hard benches all day. Some of the women, she wrote, were no more insane than she was. Her report ran in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and appeared as a book the same year. A grand jury investigated, and the city added $850,000 to the budget of the department that ran the asylum.
This is the book that made her name and the one every later investigative journalist owes something to. It is short, direct, and still genuinely shocking. Start here.
— LisanneSix Months in Mexico
Before the asylum, Bly spent almost six months in Mexico in 1886 and 1887 as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, aged twenty-one. She wrote about markets, bullfights, the poor and the press, and about the government of Porfirio Díaz. When she protested the jailing of a local journalist for criticising the regime, the authorities threatened to arrest her, and she left. The book collects those dispatches.
Less famous than her asylum or world-tour books, but it shows her instincts held up outside a single planned stunt: she kept finding stories that made powerful people uncomfortable wherever she went.
— LisanneThe Mystery of Central Park
Bly’s first published novel, a detective story built around a young woman found dead in Central Park, written in the same years she was making her name at the World. For a long time it was thought to be her only fiction; it was not, as the lost novels further down show.
A curiosity more than a masterpiece. Read it if you want the complete picture of what Bly published, not as a starting point.
— LisanneAround the World in Seventy-Two Days
Nellie Bly’s Book
On 14 November 1889 Bly left New Jersey on the steamship Augusta Victoria to beat the fictional record of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, carrying little more than one dress and a small bag. She met Verne himself in Amiens, crossed to Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, and arrived back on 25 January 1890, after seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. A rival, Elizabeth Bisland of Cosmopolitan, raced her in the opposite direction and lost. The book was first published as Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.
Read this back to back with Ten Days in a Mad-House and you get the two halves of Bly in full: the reporter willing to suffer for a story, and the showman willing to turn her own body into the story. Both are true at once.
— LisanneThe Lost Novels of Nellie Bly
Between 1890 and 1895 Bly wrote eleven novels for Norman Munro’s Family Story Paper in New York and its London counterpart. They were never published as books and were forgotten until the writer David Blixt tracked them down in archives in London, Toronto, New York and Pennsylvania. They have been republished since 2021 as The Lost Novels of Nellie Bly. Four of them:
New York by Night · 1890s, republished 2021
One of the eleven serial novels, set in the city she was reporting on at the time.
Bookshop.org and more
Eva the Adventuress · 1890s, republished 2021
A serial novel about a woman making her way by her wits, from the same run in the Family Story Paper.
Bookshop.org and more
Wayne’s Faithful Sweetheart · 1890s, republished 2021
Another of the eleven, a romance serial from the same years.
Bookshop.org and more
Alta Lynn, M.D. · 1890s, republished 2021
A serial novel about a woman doctor, written when women in medicine were still a novelty.
Bookshop.org and more
The years · 1864–1922
Quick facts about Nellie Bly
- Known for
- Going undercover herself, the reporting that turned stunt journalism into investigative journalism
- 1864
- Born in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania
- 1885
- First job, Pittsburgh Dispatch
- 1889–90
- Around the world in 72 days
- 1914
- Reports from the Eastern Front
- 1922
- Dies in New York City, aged 57
- Real name
- Elizabeth Jane Cochran, later Cochrane
- Pen name
- From the Stephen Foster song “Nelly Bly”, misspelled by her editor
- Books
- Four in her lifetime, 1887–1890, plus eleven serial novels rediscovered in 2021
- Later life
- Married Robert Seaman in 1895 and ran his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company
The red mark is 1887, the year she had herself committed.
Nellie Bly’s Method: How Stunt Journalism Became Investigative Journalism
She became the story instead of reporting it. Before Ten Days in a Mad-House, journalists wrote about institutions from the outside: interviewing officials, requesting records, taking guided tours designed to show them what administrators wanted seen. Bly got herself committed. She ate the food, wore the clothes, slept in the cold, and was disbelieved by doctors in exactly the way any other patient would have been. She was not reporting what she had been told; she was reporting what had happened to her.
Rival papers called it a stunt. History has mostly sided with her. The exposé led to a grand jury investigation and more money for patient care, results that conventional reporting on the asylum had not produced. What she had invented was a repeatable method in which the reporter’s own experience is the primary source, and it runs from undercover exposés to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed a century later.
The world tour used the same engine for spectacle. There was no injustice to expose, no institution to infiltrate: just a named young woman moving faster than a fictional man, reported in instalments as readers followed her progress. It is easy to read the two projects as opposites, the moral exposé and the circulation stunt, but they share one idea. Put a specific woman inside an experience and let readers live it through her.
Watch
Nellie Bly makes the news
Bly died in 1922 and no recording of her voice is known, so there is no interview. This is the next best thing: Nellie Bly Makes the News, a short animated documentary by Penny Lane, produced by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and shown by The Atlantic. The words are drawn from her own writing; the voice is an actor’s.
If you want more after Nellie Bly
Brooke Kroeger wrote the standard biography of Bly and later a history of undercover reporting. Bly's fellow pioneers of investigative journalism were Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. The undercover tradition she started runs through Ted Conover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Günter Wallraff. For an asylum seen from the inside eighty years later, read Susanna Kaysen.
More lists: Books about mental health · The best gonzo journalism books
Frequently asked questions about Nellie Bly’s books
Who is Nellie Bly?
Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, an American journalist born in 1864 who became famous for pioneering undercover investigative reporting, most notably by faking insanity to expose conditions inside a New York asylum, and for later circling the globe in seventy-two days.
What was Nellie Bly’s real name?
Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She added an “e” to her surname as a teenager, becoming Cochrane. Her first editor at the Pittsburgh Dispatch gave her the pen name, taken from the Stephen Foster song “Nelly Bly”, and misspelled it.
Is it Nellie Bly or Nelly Bly?
Nellie Bly. Her pen name came from the Stephen Foster song “Nelly Bly”, and her editor at the Pittsburgh Dispatch misspelled it as “Nellie”. The misspelling stuck.
When and where was Nellie Bly born?
On 5 May 1864, in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, a town named after her father.
How did Nellie Bly die?
She died of pneumonia on 27 January 1922 in New York City, at the age of 57.
What happened to Nellie Bly in the asylum?
In 1887 she had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island to investigate conditions there undercover. She documented ice-cold baths, spoiled food, patients tied together with ropes and abusive staff who made women sit motionless on benches for hours. Scenes involving leeches come from later dramatisations of her story, not from her own book.
Why did Nellie Bly write Ten Days in a Mad-House?
To show readers how patients were treated inside the asylum. Bly went in on assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, had herself committed, and reported what she saw, from spoiled food and ice-cold baths to sane women with no way to prove it.
How did Nellie Bly get out of the asylum?
After ten days a lawyer sent by her newspaper, the New York World, secured her release. Her commitment had been planned as an assignment, not a real diagnosis.
Was Nellie Bly at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum?
No. Bly spent her ten days in 1887 at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York City. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is in Weston, West Virginia, and has no connection to her story.
What happened after Ten Days in a Mad-House?
A grand jury investigated the asylum, with Bly’s help, and the city added $850,000 to the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections.
Is there a film about Nellie Bly?
Yes. Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story (Lifetime, 2019), directed by Karen Moncrieff, stars Christina Ricci as Bly. It is a dramatisation: scenes such as the leech treatments were added for the film and are not in her own account, Ten Days in a Mad-House.
Did Nellie Bly get married?
Yes. In 1895, at 31, she married Robert Seaman, a millionaire manufacturer who was 73. After his death in 1904 she ran his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and held two patents of her own.
Was Nellie Bly on the Titanic?
No. The Titanic sank in 1912 and Bly was in New York; she died in 1922. This is a common misconception with no historical basis.
How many books did Nellie Bly write?
Four in her lifetime: Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), Six Months in Mexico (1888), The Mystery of Central Park (1889) and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890). She also wrote eleven serial novels in the 1890s, rediscovered by David Blixt and republished from 2021.
Did Nellie Bly write novels?
Yes, more than was known for a century. The Mystery of Central Park (1889) was long thought to be her only fiction, but between 1890 and 1895 she wrote eleven novels for Norman Munro’s story papers. They were rediscovered and republished from 2021 as The Lost Novels of Nellie Bly.
What is the best Nellie Bly book to start with?
Ten Days in a Mad-House. It is the book that made her famous, established undercover investigative journalism as a serious method, and remains the most influential of her books.
Why did Nellie Bly go around the world in seventy-two days?
To beat the eighty days of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel. She left on 14 November 1889, met Verne in Amiens on the way, and was back on 25 January 1890, after seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds.
Was Six Months in Mexico written after the asylum exposé?
No, before it. Bly was in Mexico in 1886 and 1887 for the Pittsburgh Dispatch and left after protesting the jailing of a Mexican journalist. The dispatches were published as a book in 1888, after Ten Days in a Mad-House had made her famous.
Footnotes
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?”
— Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887)
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 recommendationsRead next
