Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America, winner of the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared Smithsonian, Salon, Sierra Magazine, Orion, and Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, among other publications. She is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis with her family.
Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sensational and reported the following:
Readers opening to page 99 would find disgraced publisher of the Chicago Times James J West with a suitcase full of cash, urging one of his former editors to flee with him to Europe in 1889, before he returns to Chicago and is arrested for financial malfeasance. They would also encounter Eleanor Stackhouse, pseudonym “Nora Marks,” a journalist for the rival Chicago Tribune, investigating the practice of locking up boys as young as 10 with adult men in the Cook County jail. At the bottom, she has just talked her way into the facility to conduct interviews with the young prisoners.Visit Kim Todd's website.
This page offers a glimpse of the whole but an incomplete one. Sensational is a book with a large cast of characters and interweaving stories, so a browser just flipping through wouldn’t know why West was important or that Stackhouse was part of a wave of young women in the 1880s and 1890s working in a new genre pioneered by undercover reporter Nellie Bly. On the other hand, West’s seedy tale captures the way that “stunt reporters” were often hired by marginal papers with little to lose, as their work wasn’t considered quite respectable. The page describes Nora Marks: “Like other reporters doing stunts, Marks was in her mid-twenties, courageous, and curious about the hidden side of her city,” effectively locating her within the movement. Finally, page 99 includes an illustration of a promotion for Marks, blaring in large type: “Where has Nora Marks been during the last two weeks? Not idle surely. She has had a new adventure—more unique than any before undertaken by a newspaper reporter.” This shows the value and popularity of this kind of writing.
The rest of Sensational tracks the rise and fall of the “stunt reporters” like Marks who flooded into newspaper offices in the decade after Bly’s exposé of Blackwell’s Insane Asylum for Women in 1887 and wrote first-person stories that captured readers’ imaginations and uncovered institutional abuses. It also explores the distinct, but parallel, innovations of journalists Ida B. Wells and Victoria Earle Matthews, and argues that this cohort of women developed many of the techniques of investigative reporting and literary nonfiction still employed today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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