Around the World in Seventy-Two Days by Nellie Bly is an adventure travelogue of the author's famous journey around the world. It is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what gives birth to an idea. Ideas are the chief stock in trade of newspaper writers and generally they are the scarcest stock in market, but they do come occasionally.

"Around the World in Seventy-Two Days" from Nellie Bly. American journalist, author, industrialist, and charity worker (1864-1922).

"Ten Days in a Mad-House" from Nellie Bly. American journalist, author, industrialist, and charity worker (1864-1922).

ONE wintry night I bade my few journalistic friends adieu, and, accompanied by my mother, started on my way to Mexico. Only a few months previous I had become a newspaper woman. I was too impatient to work along at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers, so I conceived the idea of going away as a correspondent.

"Six Months in Mexico" from Nellie Bly. Was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman.She was also a writer, industrialist, inventor, and a charity worker who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days (1864-1922).

Ten Days In a Mad-House (1887) by Nellie Bly. Nellie Bly, whose given name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was a pio-neer of investigative journalism. She died in 1922. Of her many expose assignments for Joseph Pulitzer's NEW YORK WORLD, her voluntary (and undercover) journey into the "lunatic asylum" on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island is perhaps the most well known. In previous chapters of the series, she has (without much difficulty) fooled various doctors and authorities into deeming her insane and admitting her tothe asylum, which is located on an island just east of Manhattan. "SINCE my...