Matthew Goodman Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Matthew Goodman talks about his latest non-fiction book, Eighty Days, about Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's race around the world.

Random House Readers Circle: How did the idea for Eighty Days originate?

My previous book, The Sun and the Moon, had featured only male characters, so when I began looking around for a new book topic I knew that I wanted the next one to be about a woman. Then one day, during my book explorations, I stumbled across a reference to Nellie Bly; I recognized that name (in part because there used to be a Nellie Bly Amusement Park not far from where I live in Brooklyn), but I didn't know much about her beyond the fact that she had been a journalist. I began to read more about her, and as I did, I discovered that she wasn't just any journalist—she was this amazing journalist, who had feigned madness to expose the inner workings of an insane asylum, and so forth. I mean, in an era when the vast majority of female journalists were writing for the women's pages of newspapers, she was an undercover investigative reporter for the most widely read newspaper of her time.

So I kept on reading, and when I read about how Nellie Bly had undertaken a race around the world in 1889, I knew right away that this was the story I wanted to tell. I thought it was absolutely remarkable that a young woman, unaccompanied and carrying ...