����� ��� From November 1889 through January 1890, Nellie Bly raced around the world in a widely-publicized and sensationalized circumnavigation of the globe. Editors at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sent the plucky young Bly on the seventy-two day long trip, intending to test the validity of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days and to drive up newspaper circulation in the process. They wished to prove that fact could triumph over fiction, that a lone traveler (and a woman at that) could circle the globe in less than eighty days. Bly’s trip became a prime example of the “new journalism” of late nineteenth-century America, a newspaper style known for its emphasis on sensational stories, manipulated to bolster circulation and appeal to a mass audience that thrived on such exciting and dramatic fare. 1 Pioneered by Pulitzer in the 1880s, new journalism was marked by such journalistic novelties as ample illustration, enormous stacked headlines, celebrity writers, and above all, an emphasis on drama—all for the low price of two cents a copy. New journalism approached the news with an aesthetic of storytelling. Unlike more expensive, informational newspapers, which catered to upperclass tastes and focused on business and political news, papers operating under the banner of new journalism understood that readers enjoyed a good story in their news even more than they expected accuracy and dry information. In response, new journalism appropriated the conventions of popular literary genres—including travel narratives and fantastic novels—to frame the news for readers, and as news writers formulated a compositional style based on “the real thing,” they positioned their works in explicit competition with such entertaining fictions as Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. But the story of Nellie Bly and her race against fiction includes another, virtually forgotten chapter involving the magazine Cosmopolitan,