Six Months in Mexico — Nellie Bly

Six Months in Mexico is a book by Nellie Bly that she wrote after her travels through Mexico in about 1885. She took the initiative to work as a foreign correspondent at the age of 21. At that point she had been writing for the newspaper The Dispatch, but had become dissatisfied with having to write for the women's pages. In the book she describes the lives and customs of the people of Mexico and the poverty of the common people. She was struck by the widespread addiction to playing the lottery, noting that people would even pawn their clothes in order to buy tickets. She returned to the United States after reporting about the imprisonment of journalists by the then a dictator Porfirio Diaz put her in danger of ending up in prison herself. Nellie Bly would go on to write a second travel book, Around the World in 72 Days, telling the story of how she became the first to circumnavigate the globe."