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Nellie Bly — the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane — was one of the first investigative journalists in the United States, and arguably invented the form. In 1887 she faked insanity to get committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, then wrote the exposé that forced New York City to reform how it treated the mentally ill. Three years later she circled the globe in seventy-two days, beating Jules Verne’s fictional record and turning the stunt into a book that made her one of the most famous women in America. She wrote comparatively little for a bookshelf — most of her output ran in the New York World — but the four books she did publish are foundational to the entire genre of undercover reporting.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 books · Journalism & Adventure · Investigative Journalism · Female Authors · Non-Fiction · Memoirs & Biographies · Updated July 2026
Investigative JournalismCore book
Ten Days in a Mad-House
Bly feigned insanity to get herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York, then spent ten days documenting the abuse, neglect, and squalor she found there. Published first as a New York World series and then as a book, it forced a grand jury investigation and led to a $1 million increase in the asylum budget for patient care. It is widely credited as the founding text of American undercover journalism.
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.
Travel Journalism
Six Months in Mexico
Written after her Blackwell’s Island exposé made her too well known to work undercover in the U.S. for a while, Bly spent half a year reporting from Mexico for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. The book mixes travel writing with political reporting, including criticism of the Porfirio Díaz government sharp enough that she was warned to leave the country before she could be arrested.
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.
Novel
The Mystery of Central Park
Bly’s one venture into fiction, a mystery novel set in and around New York’s Central Park. It is the least read of her four books today and the only one that isn’t reportage, but it shows a working journalist testing what she could do with invented plot rather than documented fact.
A curiosity more than a masterpiece — read it if you want the complete picture of what Bly published, not as a starting point.
Travel · AdventureCore book
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days
In 1889, Bly set out to beat the fictional record from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, travelling alone by steamship and rail through England, France, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan before returning to New Jersey. She completed the trip in seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, becoming a global celebrity in the process. The book is her own account of the journey, serialized in the World as she travelled and published afterward.
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.
Where to start with Nellie Bly
If you have never read her
→ Start with Ten Days in a Mad-House. It is short, it is the book that invented her method, and it still reads as 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 — but it’s the book that made her a household name.
If you want the full range of what she published
→ Add Six Months in Mexico and, if you’re curious, The Mystery of Central Park — her only novel and the outlier in the set.
If the undercover-reporting angle is what draws you
→ My best investigative journalism books list has the writers working in the tradition she started.
If it’s Bly as a historical figure — a woman doing what no one thought a woman could do in 1887 — that interests you most
→ My books by female authors list and my best memoirs and biographies list both have more of the same.
Looking for what else I recommend
→ Every book I’ve personally reviewed lives on my bookshelf.
Frequently asked questions about Nellie Bly’s books
More from the shelf
Reading list
Best Investigative Journalism Books
Reporting that changed things.
Reading list
Books by Female Authors
Voices that shaped the record.
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Best Non-Fiction Books
The books that tell the truth.
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Best Memoirs and Biographies
Lives worth reading in full.
On my shelf
My Bookshelf — Book Recommendations
Every book I have personally reviewed, in one place.
