Portrait Gallery: Nellie Bly

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Today is the 152nd birthday of Nellie Bly, whose real name was Elizabeth Cochran Seaman. Bly was a journalist in the early 20th century, best known for an undercover investigation into the horrid conditions of mental hospitals, and for an around-the-world trip, to realize the fictional travels of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (she did it in seventy-two). In 1922 she died, at fifty-seven, from pneumonia.