Author Peattie Elia Wilkinson

Elia Wilkinson Peattie (January 15, 1862[1]-July 12, 1935) was an American author, journalist and critic. Elia Wilkinson was the daughter of Frederick and Amanda (Cahill) Wilkinson.[2] She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but moved with her family to Chicago when she was young. She stopped attending school when she was fourteen, but kept up a reading habit. In 1883 she married Robert Burns Peattie, a Chicago journalist. She began writing short stories for newspapers, and became a reporter with the Chicago Tribune and subsequently the Chicago Daily News. In 1889 she moved to Omaha, becoming chief editorial writer on the Omaha World-Herald. She wrote for magazines including Century, Lippincott's Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, St. Nicholas, Wide Awake, The American, America, Harper's Weekly, and San Francisco Argonaut. In 1888 she was commissioned by Chicago publishers to write a young people's history of the United States, and wrote the seven-hundred page The Story of America in four m