author
Mary Holland Kinkaid
1861–1948
A pioneering newspaperwoman and novelist, she spent about fifty years in journalism and became one of the first women to hold major newsroom roles in Los Angeles. Her fiction includes western and social novels such as Walda and The Man of Yesterday.
1 Audiobook
Walda: A Novel
by Mary Holland Kinkaid
About the author
Born Mary Holland McNeish in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on December 31, 1861, she built a long career in American journalism before also publishing novels. Sources describe her as working in newspapers and magazines for about fifty years, and she is remembered as an early woman city editor in Los Angeles.
In 1891 she married John Kinkaid, a Colorado state senator, and later wrote under the name Mary Holland Kinkaid. Alongside her newspaper work, she published fiction including Walda (1903) and The Man of Yesterday, blending popular storytelling with the perspective of someone who knew western and urban American life firsthand.
She died in Laguna Beach, California, on October 20, 1948, at age 86. Though not widely read today, she stands out as a versatile writer who moved between reporting, editing, illustration, and fiction at a time when few women were given that range of opportunity.