Mary Roberts Rinehart was a very famous American mystery writer. She wrote novels 14 years before Agatha Christie and was often referred to as The American Agatha Christie. The novel that began her climb to fame, "The Circular Staircase," published in 1908, sold 1.25 million copies, but because I read her autobiography, "My Story", I admired her work as a nurse and war correspondent and found her travels with her husband, Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart,[1] fascinating.
Mary graduated from the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses at Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital in 1896. That is where she met her husband, and that event changed her life drastically. She was quoted as saying nurses training in that bygone era included experiencing "all the tragedy of the world under one roof." Mary should be applauded for going public about her breast cancer in 1947, a time when such a revelation was rare. In an article published in the Ladies Home Journal, she encouraged women to have breast exams.
I gave my copy of her 1931 "My Story" to a friend who is a nurse because Mary's description of those training days and her experiences being sent to military installations in Europe to evaluate their conditions, I believe, though I wish I could describe that better. That was during WWI, but she was also a correspondent in WWII. She wrote that she was the first woman sent to Europe as a war correspondent and was privileged to interview such world leaders as Winston Churchill and the King and Queen of Belgium. Her personal life was tremendous to read about, too, as it included fascinating travel including camping trips in the Western states. Their life later when Dr. Rinehart became involved in the early days of the Veterans Administration and they lived in Washington, D.C. takes you back in history and gives a glimpse into the lives of the Rinehart family and other famous people they knew. If I ever come across her book, Kings, Queens and Pawns in 1915, I'll be thrilled to discover more about Mary Roberts Rinehart and am thankful Wikipedia's section on her includes the titles of much if not all of her writing.
See also:
R > Roberts | R > Rinehart > Mary Ella (Roberts) Rinehart
Categories: Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia | Fiction Writers | United States, Novelists | War Correspondents | Notables | United States Army, World War I