Celebrated in her lifetime but nearly forgotten today, writer Rebecca Harding Davis was a literary pioneer who exposed the bleak conditions endured by industrial workers in America in the mid-1860s.  Her novella, “Life In the Iron Mills,” which appeared in The Atlantic in April 1861, introduced readers to the “soul starvation” and “living death,” faced by those workers.  It was a story so groundbreaking that thirty year old Rebecca Harding, from Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia) was invited to Concord, Massachusetts, to be feted by the literary lions of the time, Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts.  For a time, she was the most famous writer in America.

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