Skip to Main Content

Course & Subject Guides

Mary Roberts Rinehart - Oakland Campus: Background

Resources related to ENGLIT Women and Literature course

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Portrait of Mary Roberts Rinehart This LibGuide is created for Dr. Kirsten Paine's ENGLIT Women and Literature course. Ground-breaker Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) served as war correspondent, journalist, and writer. Perhaps best known for her mysteries, Rinehart published poems, short stories, plays, articles, essays, memoirs, romances, and novels and some of these were adapted for stage, film, radio, and television. Hailing from Pittsburgh, Rinehart corresponded with well-known political, publishing, social, society, and entertainment figures of the  early 20th centuryRinehart was also involved with publishing during her successful career.  Her sons Stanley M. Rinehart Jr. and Fredrick R. Rinehart co-founded Farrar & Rinehart and published much of Mary Roberts Rinehart's books. In 1949 John Farrar left to form Farrar Straus & Giroux.  After 1946, Rinehart & Co. and continued to publish Rinehart’s novels. Contracts and publisher correspondence is also contained in the archive.

Please view the finding aid for The Mary Roberts Rinehart Papers which are housed in Archives & Special Collections and document her life, with emphasis on her career as a writer, her travels, activities, and correspondence. Selected portions of the collection have been digitized and are available online. 

Additionally, this LibGuide offers suggested secondary sources and non-ULS resources that may be of research interest.

Frontispiece portrait of Mary Roberts Rinehart in My Story, [1931]

First Female US War Correspondent

 In 1915, prior to the US involvement in World War I, Mary Roberts Rinehart requested that the Saturday Evening Post send her to Europe as a reporter. Rinehart subsequently returned to Europe in 1918 to report on the war, this time for the US War Department.  These experiences influenced her works, such as her 1918 novel, The Amazing Interlude, which features Rinehart a girl who leaves her fiancée to run a soup kitchen near the front and falls in love with a Belgian aristocrat, both instances inspired by real life individuals Rinehart met while during her war correspondent years. The image above also include content from the ULS's Hervey Allen Papers.  Clockwise from top left: Mary Roberts Rinehart's WWI notebook; photo of Hervey Allen as a soldier; a khaki handkerchief in which Allen left behind his war poems as he swam across a river when his company was being attacked; Allen's emergency will written in France during the war.

Tenting To-Night dust jacket

Dust jacket from Tenting To-Night, [1918]

Tenting  To-Night chronicles  the  backcountry  trip  made  by  Mary  and  Stanley Rinehart and their three sons through Glacier National Park and the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in July and August 1916.  In the North Cascades, Mary describes an adventure  cañon-fishing  near  the  fork  of  Bridge  Creek  in  the  Stehekin  River Valley and her encounter there with a wily trout.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts, (1876-1958).

Tenting To-Night

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, [1917, 1918].

University Library System - Archives & Special Collections

Photo of Rinehart and family from inside of a tent

Rinehart & family getting ready for the day's fishing at their camp near Bowman Lake at Glacier National Park, Montana, 1916

Papers of Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1831-1994.

University Library System - Mary Roberts Rinehart Collection, Archives & Special Collections

Before Cut and Paste--Straight-Pinning!

Before computers and the advent of the "cut and paste" function, there were straight pins!  Mary Roberts Rinehart, like other writers of the time, adhered to the early 20th century practice of cutting and pinning edits to a manuscript draft.  Pictured are related objects from Rinehart’s desk, including a pair of scissors and a container of straight pins.

Women in Angling

There are notable examples of women anglers that have made significant contributions to the literature and sport of angling.   The women included in this exhibit are listed below.

Photos

Mary Roberts Rinehart at Stehekin River waterfall

Cañon-fishing near the fork of Bridge Creek in the Stehekin River Valley, 1916

Rinehart and sons prepare to fish at Stehekin waterfall

Rinehart and sons prepare for cañon-fishing, 1916

Rinehart with tarpon in Keys

Mary at Useppa Island, Florida, with the gold button tarpon, 1929

Close-up of Mary and the tarpon

Mary with shark-bitten tarpon at Useppa Island, Florida, 1929