Elia W. Peattie

Elia Wilkinson Peattie (January 15, 1862 – July 12, 1935) was an American author, journalist and critic.

Elia Wilkinson was the daughter of Frederick and Amanda (Cahill) Wilkinson. She was born on January 15, 1862, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but moved with her family to Chicago when she was young. She stopped attending school when she was fourteen, but kept up a reading habit. In 1883 she married Robert Burns Peattie, a Chicago journalist.

She began writing short stories for newspapers, and in 1886 became a reporter with the Chicago Tribune and subsequently the Chicago Daily News. In 1888 the family moved to Omaha after Peattie and her husband accepted jobs at the Omaha Daily Herald. When Gilbert Hitchcock bought the Daily Herald and combined it into the Omaha World-Herald Peattie became chief editorial writer for the paper. Peattie wrote over 800 columns, editorials, and stories in the World-Herald offering a voice to frontier women. Peattie did not limit her articles to societal pieces and was active in political discourse. A supporter of orphanages, charity hospitals, and the need for shelters she also took a hard line and was outspoken in her opposition of capital punishment, lynching, and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

She wrote for magazines including Century, Lippincott's Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, St. Nicholas, Wide Awake, The American Magazine, America, Harper's Weekly, and San Francisco Argonaut. In these stories Peattie presented hope and refused to bend to Modernism and its disillusioned outlook on life.

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