author
Florence Finch Kelly
1858–1939
A pioneering newspaperwoman and novelist, she turned life on the Kansas plains and in the American West into fiction with energy, humor, and independence. Her long career also helped open space for women in journalism and literary criticism.
6 Audiobooks
With Hoops of Steel
by Florence Finch Kelly
Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories
by Florence Finch Kelly
Rhoda of the Underground
by Florence Finch Kelly
What America did : A record of achievement in the prosecution of the war
by Florence Finch Kelly
The Fate of Felix Brand
by Florence Finch Kelly
The Delafield Affair
by Florence Finch Kelly
About the author
Born in Illinois in 1858 and raised in Kansas, Florence Finch Kelly built an unusually wide-ranging career as a journalist, novelist, short-story writer, feminist, and suffragist. She studied at the University of Kansas and went on to write for newspapers and magazines at a time when journalism offered few openings for women.
Her fiction often drew on western settings and frontier experience, and several of her works later entered the public domain and remain available through Project Gutenberg. Alongside her creative writing, she became especially well known for newspaper work and for many years served as a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.
Kelly died in 1939, but her career still stands out for its range: she moved between reporting, criticism, activism, and popular fiction with ease. She is a good example of an author whose writing life was closely tied to the changing opportunities for American women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.