We at Raab are delighted to share that our director of communications, Rebecca Rego Barry, has written a new book that comes out this month. The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells is a biography of the author and collector Carolyn Wells, who catapulted to fame in the 1890s as a poet and humorist and whose friends included Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Mark Twain. Later in life, Wells began writing detective novels, completing a total of 82 of them–with some bestsellers, and some made into films–before her death in 1942. She also collected rare books, and her world-class collection of Walt Whitman now resides at the Library of Congress.
While Wells was a household name in the early twentieth century, she faded into obscurity in the succeeding decades. In this first-ever biography of Wells, Barry determines to find out how and why that happened and to restore the legacy of a prolific writer whose story is all too emblematic of forgotten women’s history.
If you’d like to learn more, Barry will be giving a free virtual talk on February 15th at 2:00 pm EST, hosted by Ohio State University Libraries. Register here.
The book will be available wherever books are sold, and signed or inscribed copies may be ordered here.
Barry’s book joins a number of other books written by those of us at Raab, including Nathan Raab’s The Hunt for History (Scribner, 2020) and Steven Raab’s With the 3rd Wisconsin Badgers: The Living Experience of the Civil War Through the Journals of Van R. Willard, as well as their co-produced volume, In the Presence of History.
