By the time Joseph Pulitzer's New York World announced in November 1889 its latest news-making stunt--to send the "plucky young reporter" Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) on a trip around the world to challenge factually the fictional record set by Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg-- a daunting tradition of American travel writing already overshadowed the project. Since the European discovery of North America, authors and publishers had harvested the fruitful business of presenting their travels to a wider reading public; and in the nineteenth century especially, that presentation often occurred first in the periodical press. But the problem with travel writing, be it in book or periodical form, was that once the world had been thoroughly traversed and charted (both figuratively and literally), the market for travel writing began to shrink. Readers and publishers were already complaining in the 1840s about a narrative path which was deeply worn and rutted by earlier travel writers. If aspiring travel writers were to remain viable in the literary marketplace, they would either need to discover new lands, or else "rediscover" the same old territories in novel packages for their readers.
By the 1880s travel writers grew increasingly adroit in marketing their work by collaborating, for instance, with artists and illustrators, spotlighting emerging forms of transportation, and producing meta-travel narratives which critiqued the very impossibility of writing travel narratives in the fin-de-siècle. But even at a time in the century when unusual travel writings appeared frequently, the case of the New York World and Nellie Bly's trip around the world in seventy-two days still stands out as remarkable; for here newspaper editors became particularly aggressive and creative in packaging and marketing their latest travel-writer-cum-stunt-reporter. Perhaps the most telling marketing device centered around the newspaper's use of another unusual "travel writer": Jules Verne, author of the 1873 best-selling fantasy Around the World in Eighty Days. Investigation into the newspaper's attention to Verne underscores how it manipulated the novelist's reputation as an imaginative travel writer in order to give its latest nonfiction journey-quest an attractive, novel spin. But the story does not end there, for Verne himself profited from the World's marketing ploys, using in his turn the paper's travel writing as a spark to recharge his own reputation. Ultimately, examination into the World's casting of Nellie Bly as a "female Phileas Fogg" illuminates the complex intersection of factual and fictional travel writing in late nineteenth-century America, underscoring the provocative milieu of literature and journalism, fact and fiction, and narrative boundary work in American print history.
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