Velma Caldwell Melville

Born in Greenwood, Wisconsin, in 1858, she became known as an American writer of prose and poetry as well as a magazine and newspaper editor. She worked on the Practical Farmer in Philadelphia and the Wisconsin Farmer in Madison, helping shape family- and home-focused reading for a broad audience.

Contemporary accounts describe her as an especially active contributor to newspapers and periodicals across the central and western United States. Her writing ranged from verse and domestic pieces to fiction, and her animal story White Dandy; or, Master and I is the work most often remembered today.

She died in 1924. Although not widely known now, her career shows how much influence women writers and editors had in nineteenth-century American periodical culture, especially in regional and household publications.