Trials of a Scold

Long-listed for the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, The Trials of a Scold is a groundbreaking and passionate biography of America’s first female muckraker, who was convicted as a “common scold” in 1829 in one of the most bizarre trials in the nation’s history.Anne Royall was an American original—a stranger to fear who defied nineteenth-century skeptics as a prolific literary force, satirist, and social critic. Publishing her first book in 1826 at age fifty-seven, Royall reinvented herself as a “women politico” a generation before the women's suffrage movement, a pioneering travel writer and satirist who broke ground on the wagon trails a generation before Mark Twain, and an investigative journalist who took on bankers and prison conditions a half century before muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Nellie Bly. She authored ten books and published a newspaper in Washington, D.C., for twenty-five years, until she died in 1854 at age eighty-five.Left destitute after her husband’s death, Royall turned to writing as she traveled from Alabama to Washington, D.C., and then across the country, acquiring fame and then enemies for her scathing and hilarious denouncements of corruption, incompetence, and the blurry lines between church and state.Drawing from Royall's largely overlooked literary works, Biggers brings to light Royall’s unsparing satire; her pioneering role as a chronicler, publisher, muckraker, and social commentator; and the timeless issues of religion, politics, and freedom of the press that still define the great American experience.