Mary Roberts Rinehart

Rinehart trained as a nurse in Pittsburgh, married the doctor she met on the wards, and might have written nothing at all. The stock market crash of 1903 wiped the family out and left them thousands of dollars in debt. She began writing stories to clear it, and cleared it.

The Circular Staircase followed in 1908, and within a few years she was the best-paid writer in the United States. She is credited with the "had I but known" turn that runs through a century of suspense fiction, and the phrase "the butler did it" attached itself to her — though it appears in none of her books.

In 1915 the Saturday Evening Post sent her to Europe and she reached the Belgian front line, interviewed the King of the Belgians and Queen Mary, and filed dispatches from closer to the fighting than nearly any correspondent, at a time when women were barred from the front.

The bravest thing she wrote came later. In 1947, having had a mastectomy, she published a full account of her breast cancer in a mass-circulation magazine, at a period when the illness was not named in print. She died in 1958.