Miriam Michelson

Miriam Michelson (1870–1942) was born in the mining camp of Murphy's, California, the seventh of eight children of Samuel and Rosalie Michelson, Polish-Jewish immigrants who later kept a store supplying miners in Virginia City, Nevada. Her elder brother Albert A. Michelson became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences; her younger brother Charles became a journalist and later a close aide to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Miriam herself broke into a trade largely closed to women, covering crime and politics for San Francisco's daily papers through the 1890s. In the Bishop's Carriage (1904) was popular enough to be filmed in 1913 with Mary Pickford in the lead; A Yellow Journalist (1905) drew on her own newspaper years. She also published Anthony Overman (1906), The Awakening of Zojas (1910) and Petticoat King (1929).