author
Josephine Diebitsch Peary
1863–1955
An early Arctic traveler and writer, she turned dangerous expeditions into vivid first-hand storytelling. Her life joined adventure, endurance, and a rare woman’s perspective on polar exploration in the late 19th century.
3 Audiobooks
My Arctic journal: a year among ice-fields and Eskimos
by Josephine Diebitsch Peary
Children of the Arctic
by Josephine Diebitsch Peary, Marie Ahnighito Peary
The Snow Baby: A true story with true pictures
by Josephine Diebitsch Peary
About the author
Born in 1863, she became an American author and Arctic explorer best known for joining expeditions to Greenland with her husband, Robert Peary. Sources consistently describe her as one of the earliest white women to winter in the Arctic, and her experiences helped make her an unusual public figure for her time.
Her best-known book, My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos (1893), drew on those journeys and introduced many readers to daily life, hardship, and travel in the far north. Biographical sources also note that she was the daughter of a Smithsonian linguist, a detail that helps place her in a world of scholarship and exploration from an early age.
She died in 1955. Today she is remembered not only as the wife of a famous explorer, but as a writer and explorer in her own right whose published work preserves a first-hand account of Arctic travel.