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Author and Playwright, "The American Agatha Cristie"
August 12, 1876 - September 22, 1958. Allegheny City now Pittsburgh
"War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with bewildering eyes that are soon to close; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water."
Mary Roberts Rinehart known as "The American Agatha Christie," was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now Pittsburgh). Roberts trained as a nurse and graduated from the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses in 1896. She married physician Stanley M. Rinehart in 1896 and they had three sons together. She took up writing in 1903 to earn income after investments in the stock market crash created severe financial difficulties. Her first story appeared in Munsey's Magazine in 1903. The Circular Staircase (1908). Her first book, a mystery, was an immediate success. The following year, The Man in Lower Ten, which had been serialized earlier, reinforced her success. Thereafter she wrote steadily, averaging about a book a year. A long series of comic tales about the redoubtable "Tish" (Letitia Carberry) appeared over a number os years as serials in the Saturday Evening Post as a series of novels beginning with The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911).
Rinehart served as the first woman war correspondent to the Belgian front during WW1. She described her experiences in several book., notably Kings, Queens and Pawns (1915). She also wrote a number orf romances and nine plays. Her greatest successes were Seven Days, produced in New York in 1909, and The Bat, derived from The Circular Staircase and produced in 1920. In 1929, she helped her sons establish the publishing house of Farrar & Rinehart. She remained best known, however, as a writer of mysteries. The growing popularity of that genre following World War ll led to frequent republication of her works. Her most memorable tales combined murder, love, ingenuity, and humor in a style that was distinctly her own. At Rinehart's death, her books had sold more than 10 million copies.
