Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age: Essays on Reporting from the Arctic to the Orient - Paperback

by Katrina J. Quinn (Editor), Mary M. Cronin (Editor), Lee Jolliffe (Editor)

These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news--indeed to achieve star billing--and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.

Author Biography

Katrina J. Quinn is a professor of communication at Slippery Rock University. Named a Hazel Dicken-Garcia Distinguished Scholar of Journalism History in 2019, she has published on topics such as nineteenth-century political reporting, sensationalism, literary journalism, narrative, and personal accounts of the American frontier. Mary M. Cronin is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century press performance and legal issues. The author of three previous books and numerous scholarly journal articles, Cronin was a former reporter, copy editor, and assistant news editor in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Florida prior to her academic career. Lee Jolliffe is a professor of journalism at Drake University, where she teaches media design and honors courses on the media. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a freelance writer and as supervisor of the Writing and Editing Section at Battelle Institute on projects for NASA, DOE, DoD, NSF, NIH, and the EPA.