Overview

In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!”

If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family.

Author Information

Julia Bricklin is the award-winning biographer several important figures in United States history, including female sharpshooter Lillian Frances Smith (University of Oklahoma Press: April 2017) trailblazing reporter Nell Campbell, aka “Polly Pry” (TwoDot Books: September 2018) and Ned Buntline, creator of the celebrity of Buffalo Bill Cody. Bricklin occasionally writes true crime, notably BLONDE RATTLESNAKE, the story of Los Angeles’s most notorious figures in Prohibition-era Los Angeles. She is a frequent contributor well-respected commercial and academic journals and digital publications such as the Saturday Evening Post, Zócalo Public Square, Smithsonian.com, Civil War Times, Financial History, and California History.