When Kate McPhelim Cleary died at age forty-one in 1905, she had been publishing poems, stories, articles, and novels for twenty-seven years. Forced to "publish or perish" by economic necessity at age fourteen when she sold her first short story, Cleary's writings throughout her life helped support her loved ones. She wrote literally hundreds of works for newspapers, especially the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Daily News, and prestigious periodicals such as McClure's, Belford's Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Puck, St. Nicholas, and the Youth's Companion. During her time, she was well-known in the Midwest, especially in the Chicago area, as a humorist and a writer of realistic, sometimes naturalistic, stories about the settlement period of the West. Her best works appeared between 1895 and 1899, years of extreme stress, both financial and emotional, in her life.

Born in 1863 in Richibucto, New Brunswick, Cleary lived her early years in comfort. After the unexpected death in 1865 of her father, James McPhelim, a pioneer in the Canadian lumber and shipping business, the family remained in New Brunswick. Cleary received a solid education at the Sacred Heart Convent in St. John, where she studied art and the classics. Unfortunately, sometime in the late 1870s, her mother, Margaret, encountered financial difficulties, and the family returned temporarily to Ireland, the homeland of Mrs. McPhelim and her husband. The Irish, however, were experiencing extreme food shortages themselves, and the McPhelims joined the emigrants flocking to America. The family arrived in Philadelphia about 1879. In 1880, the McPhelims moved to Chicago where Cleary completed her education at St. Xavier's Convent school.

The 1880s were difficult years for Mrs. McPhelim and her children, Edward, Frank, and Kate. The family struggled to survive, living off of sporadic income from their "Irish estate" and money the family earned by writing. Cleary described their financial situation as "absurdly poor." In an autobiographical short story, "Why We Didn't Hear Nilsson," Cleary explained, "When our poverty reached its lowest ebb--the stage where it ceased to continue lamentable and became ridiculous--we were prompt to see its vulnerable points and we hurled at these, between a sob and a laugh, sharp lances of wit." This ability to find humor in adversity served Cleary well throughout her life.

By pooling their writing talents and by employing humor and wit to face crises, they managed to survive hunger and despair. Cleary, her mother, and Edward all wrote for the popular press, selling their poems for $36 a dozen and their short stories to the family story-papers and the ten-cent magazines. To supplement their income, Cleary also hand-painted decorative tiles and sold illustrations to newspapers and periodicals.

While in Chicago, Kate met the charming and gregarious Irishman, Michael Timothy Cleary, to whom she became engaged. Interested in relocating in the West for his health, Michael traveled to Nebraska, and, with the help of his brother-in-law, invested in a lumber business in the newly-formed town of Hubbell, situated on the Nebraska-Kansas border. Michael returned to Chicago and married Kate, who had just finished her first novel for Street and Smith, The Lady of Lynhurst (1886), a popular work for their "Leading Novel" series. In March, the young couple, accompanied by Mrs. McPhelim, stepped off of the Burlington and Missouri train onto the wooden sidewalks of Hubbell, a former cornfield that only four years earlier had mushroomed into a town of one hundred buildings in just ninety days.

By September, the Clearys had moved into a large, two-story. beautifully furnished Victorian-style home, and Kate, under the urging of Street and Smith, began work on a second novel, Vella Vernel: or, an Amazing Marriage. She also wrote a few local color sketches about life in a rural western community. However, since her husband's lumber and coal business was flourishing in the growing town, she now wrote only for her own satisfaction and did not actively pursue publishing; instead, she employed her creative talents in homemaking. Three years later, on 19 January 1887, the Cleary's first son, James, was born.

The following October, Cleary finished Vella Vernel, and Street and Smith published the novel, a sentimental potboiler that the publishers proclaimed was based on actual events set in a major western American city. A comedy of manners focusing on mistaken identities and several pairs of star-crossed lovers, the novel rises above pulp fiction in its local color descriptions of Chicago and the Interstate Industrial Exposition as well as in its humor, subtle wit, and flashes of satire.

From 1887 to 1894, Cleary's writing and publishing were wide-ranging. Firmly declaring her views on the position of female writers in American literature in "The New Man," she asserted that too many critics emphasized women writers' homemaking abilities above their literary talents, and too few dealt with "what women have done in literature, without any apology for their having presumed to do it." Cleary stood up for the woman writer who would "send her soul beyond the four walls of the kitchen," and she put her beliefs into practice. She wrote children's poems for Saint Nicholas, humorous poems and satiric sketches for Puck, sentimental short stories for Chicago and Detroit newspapers, and articles on cooking and homemaking for Good Housekeeping. Her first naturalistic tales about the West also appeared, most importantly "Feet of Clay" in Belford's Monthly and "Told of a Prairie Schooner" in the Chicago Tribune.

During these same eight years, children Marguerite, Gerald, Rosemary, and Vera Valentine were born; her brother, Frank, her mother, Margaret, and her daughter, Marguerite, died; and Cleary, herself, barely survived complications from childbirth fever. As a result, through her doctor's treatment for the pain, she became addicted to morphine.

In 1895, Cleary's life seemed to be spiraling downward. Her husband left temporarily for Chicago in February due to health and business failures and remained absent from Nebraska for more than nine months. During his absence, Rosemarie, age three, died in March, and Vera Valentine came down with typhoid fever, the same illness that had taken the life of daughter Marguerite. Cleary, who had not yet regained her health from the childbirth complications, nursed her daughter through the illness while she, herself, suffered a series of what she termed in her letters as "heart attacks" and dysentery, perhaps from an effort to withdraw from her reliance on morphine for pain-relief.

Throughout all of this trauma, Cleary retreated to her typewriter, sometimes writing humorous social satires like "A Call on the Bride," "The New Man," and "A Bicycle Conundrum," and other times composing somber tales of hardship on the plains, such as "The Judas Tree," "A Western Wooing," "For the Rest of Her Life," and "An Incident of the Prairie: A Board, a Saw, a Few Nails, and a Mother's Hot Tears" to relieve her financial and emotional burdens. With these writings, Cleary began to find her voice, and her ambivalent attitude toward life on the plains surfaced. Cleary understood the West as a region of extremes. In her poem, "To Nebraska," that prefaces her novel, Like a Gallant Lady (1897), she explained her love/hate relationship with Nebraska, a place that had been both kind and cruel to her, a place that harbored her as a "bride, and slave and guest." She had found happiness in the natural beauty of the prairie and in her growing family, yet she had suffered hardships and losses, too, like those of her neighbors. From her comfortable home on the main street of Hubbell, Cleary could look with pity and compassion at the visiting rural women, who had too little money to spend, too much hard physical labor to endure, and too many children to raise. At the same time, she could laugh at the pretensions of her neighbors, who were trying to duplicate gentile, eastern society in the dusty middle of nowhere.

In 1896, Cleary's husband stayed in Hubbell, and her life regained some emotional as well as economic balance. She and her son, Jim, actively participated in the McKinley political campaign, with Cleary writing speeches, poems, and songs to support their Republican candidate. Another son, Edward, or "Teddy," was born in January of 1897, and that fall, Cleary published her third novel, Like a Gallant Lady, this time with Way and Williams, who would also publish Kate Chopin's Awakening the next year. The plot of Like a Gallant Lady revolves around a young woman from Chicago who comes to Bubble, Nebraska, after learning of the death of her fiancé and evolves into a mystery as she uncovers an insurance scam. Cleary introduced each chapter with an appropriate quotation from Shakespeare, whom she revered, and borrowed themes, character types, and plot devices from several of his plays for her novel, especially the idea of a potion that would produce a death-like trance. Although Cleary employed sentimental conventions for popular appeal, the novel is noteworthy for several successes.

First, GAllant Lady features a strong, independent, intelligent woman as the central character. Cleary prefaced her novel with a quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "The World's male chivalry has perished out,/ But Women are Knights Errant to the last." Cleary's protagonist, Ivera Lyle, embarks upon on a personal quest and discovers a fraud in which her fiancé has become entangled as well as the illegitimate child that he has fathered. After several twists and turns of the plot, Ivera discovers that her fiancé has not really been buried at all but remains hidden away in a vegetative state. Ivera denounces him and returns to Chicago, followed by the handsome Englishman, Jack Jardine, who has come West to make his fortune and with whom she has fallen in love. However, Cleary does not conclude with the arbitrary marriage, for Ivera does not need to be rescued, and it is clear that she does not mean to return to Nebraska.

Cleary's western setting and local color descriptions also add realism and depth to the novel, countering the romantic plot. She included rich details of daily life in a small frontier town throughout the work, like her descriptions of the railroad station, the community Opera House, and the local tavern as well as the embryo town and its inhabitants: "the staring crowd of flannel-shirted, top-booted men, of clumsy women, of gaping children; the brand new buildings, many in process of erection, straggling across riven cornfields."

When the protagonist, Ivera, first views the plains, she is impressed by the beauty and solitude, remarking, "It was an idyllic morning, the sky blue and luminous, the earth wearing a fresh-washed face, the air crisp and caressing." Ivera considers the "absolute absence of sound" as peaceful and restful. After the protagonist has stayed in Nebraska for several months and spoken with the rural women, she revises her opinion of the region, comparing the silence to "gigantic coils that crushed out individuality--almost extinguished identity" and noting that the only people who write romantically about the plains are those who have had no personal experience there. As for the farm women, Cleary respected their courage but echoed Hamlin Garland in describing the drudgery and hopelessness of their lives. Alluding to Rudyard Kipling's story of the ride of Morrowbie Jukes and his endeavor to escape from the plague pit, she could see no way out for these imprisoned pioneers.

In addition, Cleary's minor characters add strength to the novel. The most memorable is Maria McLelland, a character who recurs in her fiction and serves not only as a source of local color and comic relief, but also as a confidant for the young protagonist. Another humorous character is Peter Jennings, a stereotypical Englishman, a western version of Cyrano de Bergerac, who serves as a foil to Jardine. And, perhaps for spite, Cleary added the character of a morphine-addicted country doctor, Dr. Eldridge, as one of the villains involved in the insurance fraud.

In the reviews of Like a Gallant Lady, many critics favorably compared Cleary to Garland, especially his stories compiled in Main-Travelled Roads, published in 1891. The novel typically received positive reviews, except from some Nebraska critics who flinched at Cleary's harsh depiction of the plains and its inhabitants, and in 1900 the book went into a second printing.

Due to the economic depression of the nineties, the American economy was plummeting, and by 1898, Cleary's husband's business and his health were failing. While she stayed in Hubbell to manage the household, family, and finances, Michael traveled to find a suitable climate, ultimately deciding to relocate the family in Chicago. Meanwhile, Cleary resumed her eclectic publishing, editing her brother's poetry for the Chicago Tribune, writing humorous and occasional verse, stories, and articles, and producing a couple of sentimental short stories. She seemed to be cleaning up the family's business and cleaning out her desk drawers of publishable materials in preparation for the move.

By July 1898, the Clearys had rented an apartment in Austin, Illinois, a strongly Irish suburb of Chicago, and Michael began work as the secretary and treasurer for Dumont and Cleary, an advertising agency. Upon her return to the city, the Chicago Chronicle paid tribute to Cleary as one of the three leading women humorists in Chicago, calling her a "natural humorist," citing her contributions to Puck and other periodicals, and noting her laughter-loving Irish temperament and bohemian unconventionality. Distanced from the West, Cleary could see it more clearly, and she began writing her most successful stories, patterned after, or perhaps even revised from, the ones she had created in 1895.

The first of the 1899 stories published in the Chicago Tribune were humorous, light-hearted satires of western life, such as "Jim Peterson's Pension," "The Rebellion of Mrs. McLelland," and "An Ornament to Society." Cleary's primary object of ridicule was the constricting ideal of nineteenth century womanhood. Life had forced Cleary to be strong and independent, for she had helped support first her mother and brothers and then her husband and four children. The image of the New Woman emerging during the 1870s and 1880s fit Cleary perfectly.

Expanding upon a minor character that had proved successful in her earlier sketches and in Gallant Lady, "The Rebellion of Mrs. McLelland" humorously comments upon the much-discussed Woman Problem of the nineties. No longer content to be the complaisant, self-effacing housewives, many American women were beginning to stand up to their husbands and demand their rights. Mrs. Maria McLelland, ironically stouter and taller than her frail yet domineering husband, has spent her life bending to her husband's miserly will--helping her spouse with the hard, physical labor of the farm, stoically lining her dresses with used, bleached flour sacks, making neckties for her stepson out of her wedding bonnet, and patiently waiting and waiting to be allowed to visit her only child from her first marriage.

When Maria receives a telegram that her granddaughter, whom she has never seen, has fallen seriously ill, is perhaps dying, she knows her husband will not allow her to waste the money for train fare to Chicago. However, when she thinks of the three farms that they own, "of the fat cattle, the two hundred hogs, the six thousand bushels of cribbed corn," she straightens her back, decides to borrow the money from her neighbor's niece, packs her suitcase, hitches up the horse and buggy, and heads to town. On the way, however, she meets her outraged husband: "Thirty years of obedience, sacrifice, submission, and now insubordination--now rebellion! A General, struck in the face by a private, could not feel more outraged--more aghast." Upon discovering that he has money stashed in the barn, she becomes even more resolute, and determines to take her fair share. "I can and I will," she declares, returns to the farm, "abscounds" with the secret money, and leaves her husband to fend for himself for two weeks.

Upon Maria's return, after untangling complications that arose from her "theft," she admits that her rebellion was "worth standin' up again pa for--though I don't know as I'll ever do it again." As her lonely and hungry spouse sits down submissively to his favorite meal of chicken potpie, the reader knows that Maria won't have to submit to his authority or resist his will again, for she has shown her ability to be both strong and self-reliant. Now she can sit beside her husband, not stand behind him.

After humorously assaulting the submission and selflessness expected of an "Angel of the House," Cleary directed her satiric barbs at the artificiality of Victorian society in "Mr. Peterson's Pension." The Petersons have lived austerely since Jim Peterson hurt his arm fifteen years earlier and had to quit his job. However, the industry and competency of his wife keeps the family clothed, well-fed, and content. When the Petersons unexpectedly receive $2,160 in back pension money, Mrs. Peterson becomes "money-proud," spending it on lavishly remodeling and refurbishing the house, buying elaborate gowns, and giving an extravagant reception in "frantic attempts to enter the exclusive circle which every town, no matter how small, boasts." Satirizing the Petersons' "pretensions to social distinction," Cleary concluded the story with Mrs. Peterson's realization of the folly of her misconceived attempts to be "society people." Sunk again into poverty, Mrs. Peterson gallantly takes control of her life, denounces the ill-fitting social pretensions, and wins back the respect once afforded her by the community.

"An Ornament to Society" is, perhaps, Cleary's most overt satire on the Cult of True Womanhood. She attacked the superficial education of the typical Victorian woman, with her frizzy hair and her gilt-framed paintings, and reconstructed a new program that would produce a woman radiating health and independence. The conflict of the story arises when Cleopatra's mother dies, making her father promise to raise the girl to be "an ornament to sassiety." An outdoor girl, she is forced into the parlor and taught to embroider doilies, paint china, and play the organ. When she rebels, her father sends her to a convent to make a lady of her. However, she becomes so homesick for the farm and the animals that she convinces the hired man to take her home, and her father is so busy courting the neighboring widow that he leaves Cleopatra to herself.

On her own, Cleopatra matures naturally and gracefully. A young woman, prescribed Cleary, should have the freedom to roam where she pleases; she should be self-taught from nature; she should be physically active, even those pursuits that are typically male-dominated; and her activities should be eclectic, ranging from candy pulls to "literaries."

In Cleopatra, Cleary created a sympathetic character, honest and caring about her parents' wishes yet strong enough even to confront the Cult of True Womanhood. An androgynous woman arises from her fiction, one who can plow fields, break wild stallions to ride, and nurse sick livestock as well as enjoy the companionship of friends at a taffy pull or the intellectual stimulation of country "literaries." Cleary offered Cleopatra as her ideal of the True Western Woman to whom "Life was such a good thing--and health--and energy--and the vast sweep of the immeasurable world around and companionship with birds, and animals, and trees, and streams, and all nature's delicious, ever-varying, never satiating sweetness!" To Cleary, such a woman, freed from societal taboos and expectations, defined the Cult of New Womanhood.

Cleary's western satires give us first-hand interpretations of life in the new West. In their westward movement, pioneers frequently transported cultural baggage that hindered social growth, such as the constricting Victorian ideals of womanhood and pretentious views of social class. However, the democratic spirit also accompanied them and found room to expand on the vast plains. Cleary, an independent and resourceful woman in her own right, encouraged that free spirit in her writings by humorously pointing out the follies of mankind and constructing alternatives. Her humor and her ability to lighten the burdens of others through her writing, not only helped her endure her own hardships, but perhaps prodded society into re-examining its unnatural expectations for women.

As 1899 wore on, Michael's business venture began to fail, and the money the Clearys had received from the sale of their house and their business in Hubbell dwindled. To help support her family, Cleary increased the number of stories for publication, and their tone became more somber. This trend, however, was not new in Cleary's writing, for beginning with her poem, "Nebraska," recited at the opening of the Nebraska Day ceremonies at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and the short sketch, "Told of a Prairie Schooner," published that same year in the Chicago Tribune," she had been realistically recording the harshness of life on the plains.

"Nebraska," a narrative poem of eighteen stanzas, although thick with vernacular dialect and sentiment, depicts the struggle of a frontier woman attempting to raise ten children in a sod house--with another one on the way. When the baby dies, she covers it with a blanket made from her wedding gown and continues to rock the cradle. The reader assumes that the woman has lost her sanity, at least temporarily. This poem echoes the naturalistic theme of some of Cleary's earlier works, such as "Feet of Clay," a short story published in 1893 in Belford's Monthly, which also depicts the negative effects of the environment on women. In this story, a young bride from the East is unable to endure the physical and emotional isolation of a Nebraska homestead, especially the traumatic birth of her first child, and her family has to come and take the mother and her baby back east. The sympathy of the townspeople in the story go to the husband, however, for having married such a weak woman: "There had been nothing in her life to cause insanity. It must have been heredity."

Although the myth that the West drove women crazy has been exaggerated, some women truly could not cope. Cleary saw such women on the streets of Hubbell and peering from their dwellings in the surrounding countryside. This naturalistic attitude in her works was undoubtedly influenced by the daily life she viewed around her, her own financial disillusionment, and the subject, style, and tone of works being published by popular writers such as Garland, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane.

In many of Cleary's realistic/naturalistic short stories, she portrayed men and women as having little opportunity for choice, bound by socioeconomic restrictions, environmental and biological forces, and gender. Women were further victimized by isolation from supportive networks of women. Many of the stories Cleary penned in 1899, such as "The Road That Didn't Lead Anywhere," "His Onliest One," and "How Jimmy Ran Away," depicted various people living in captivity on the sparsely populated frontier and could see no possibility for them to escape.

In "The Road That Didn't Lead Anywhere," an uneducated girl who becomes a mother at fifteen, is imprisoned by biological forces. She lives in a log cabin on an isolated portion of prairie with her baby, damaged during his delivery with forceps by a drunken doctor. Her husband, a coarse, drunken farmer/blacksmith, dominates her life, and she has never been out of the county in which she was born. A stranger comes to work for her husband, takes pity on the young wife, and pays for surgery to correct the child's defect. This is the only bright spot in the girl's life, however, for there will be many more such deliveries, and her future will forever lie within the confines of the homestead.

Unmarried women could be held in bondage, too, in the West because of their gender. Men needed the help of a woman to secure title to their homestead claim, not only for their physical labor and domestic skills, but to supply children for the family work force. In "His Onliest One," a young brother and sister from Holland homestead in Nebraska, waiting for "just a few good crops" in order to purchase the farm and build a fine, frame farm house. When the sister's boyfriend arrives from Holland to claim her as his bride, the brother will not allow her to leave. After the sister spends years helping her brother succeed, he surprises her by getting married and bringing home a bride and her mother for whom the sister must also cook and clean. She runs away and, fortunately, connects with the old boyfriend, and then she begins helping him succeed on his farm in Iowa.

"How Jimmy Ran Away" describes the imprisonment of an old man by social and financial forces. Jimmy, who once was "a prosperous farmer and had served a term in the legislature," divides his farms between his two children when his wife dies, and his children promise to let him live with them alternatively the rest of his life. However, to the hard-worked daughter, Jimmy, now seventy-five, has become an unwelcome burden to his daughter, so he runs away to live with the son who has grown wealthy because of his inheritance. He discovers that he is an embarrassment to his prominent son, and he returns reluctantly to his daughter. Although Cleary supplied a sentimental ending to appeal to her readers, this story, and another," For the Rest of Her Life," emphasize the problems of the elderly, who are often unappreciated, neglected, and often discarded--trapped by their dependency upon their children.

From 1900 through 1902, in spite of the success of her writing career, Cleary's life was in chaos. Neither her nor her husband's health improved, and all of Michael's various enterprises failed, forcing the family to move from one rented flat to another. Once again, Cleary had to set aside her literary aspirations and write for her family's survival. She returned to the most lucrative market, the daily short story, where she could churn out conventional sentimental fiction that needed no creativity or revision. With the exception of two stories accepted by McClure's, "The Stepmother," a harsh story about the wife of a homesteader, and "The Mission of Kitty Malone," a tale about a poor Irish couple in Chicago, all of her other short stories are formula fiction.

Cleary's typical "Story of the Day" was a sentimental romance with a Cinderella/Prince Charming theme. Her heroine usually was a beautiful young girl between seventeen and twenty whose major conflict was choosing the right dress or husband. The hero was a handsome, older man whose life was lonely or meaningless and who needed a woman to share his elegant home. Cleary knew which fantasies would sell and could compose them quickly. However, even in these stories, Cleary could not sublimate her satiric wit or her graceful style, and often autobiographical elements inform the texts. Stories such as "A Boy's Mother," "The Romance of the Ring," "The Price Paulina Paid," "The Destiny of Delores," and "A Lenten Costume" illustrate her desire to rise above accepted mediocrity. She called this writing her "good bad stuff."

Cleary most certainly would have preferred to write only "good stuff." In her formula story, "The Destiny of Delores," she wrote of a young woman who goes to Chicago to become a successful writer, believing she could work hard for newspapers and become famous. However, Delores soon realizes that "she had exaggerated ideas of the facility with which one, imaginative, although untrained, might earn a living by literary work" and that "mediocrity counts for more than crude, unpolished talent."

Cleary, too, had many counts against her in the literary world. She was a mother with children to care for and raise; she was a wife with a physically, emotionally, and financially dependent husband; and she was a woman writer who did not belong to any of the well-defined writing groups in Chicago at the turn-of-the-century. The "Harvard gang," as the academic circle was called, although intrigued by the "New Woman" image, limited their number to literary critics, not creative writers; the "artistic gang," the social elite of Chicago, formed groups such as the Little Room, the Cliff Dwellers, the Chicago Club, and the Fortnightly, where a writer's success hinged upon knowing the "right people"; and the "journalistic gang," restricted to newspapermen, businessmen, and male politicians, congregated in the Press Club and the White Chapel Club. Although Cleary had a strong literary background in the classics, she did not have the time or money to attend the university to become a part of that scene. The society circles would not accept her because they considered newspaper writing as sub-literature. And even though she had published voluminously in newspapers, her gender kept her out of the male-only clubs. Thus, Cleary remained isolated from the literary worlds of Chicago, writing to survive in the real world.

In order to meet the emotional, physical, and financial demands of her family, Cleary continued to rely on morphine, legally and easily obtained from any druggist. By June of 1902, she admitted herself to a private sanitarium to help her withdraw from her addiction. The treatment was unsuccessful, and for another year Cleary struggled to maintain her flow of stories. She even accepted a position on the staff of a new woman's magazine, the Home World, a short-lived periodical for which she contributed many of the articles, ranging in subject from cooking, sewing, and raising children to house decoration and plant selection.

By the time Cleary collapsed in 1903, while again moving her family because he husband had once more changed occupations, her output of stories had dwindled significantly. Her health and endurance were so depleted that even morphine and alcohol could not keep her going. She was admitted for treatment on 13 October to the Illinois Northern Hospital for the Insane. Thirty days later she was able to write her first letter, to her son Jim, now a student at the University of Illinois. She stated that she had lost 24 pounds during treatment but had gotten her weight up to 96 pounds. By the end of November, she wrote to Jim that her recovery was "absolute," and she was "chafing against inaction." She also declared, "I shall not soon take up housekeeping in any case--chiefly for the reason that it will pay me better to write."

In December, Cleary was transferred to the "well" ward and had gained 49 pounds. Recovering her typewriter and some manuscripts from the warehouse where the family's belongings were stored, she began sending out popular fiction to the newspaper syndicates. Checks began arriving in the mail for her at Elgin, which, to her chagrin, she could not cash until she was released. By February she was writing ten short stories a week, and was working on a special article for some doctors from Chicago. That month, too, she learned that she could be released on a three-month parole. If that was successful, she would be formally "cured" and discharged.

For unknown reasons, Cleary's husband would not sign for her release or be responsible for her parole, so Elia Peattie, a writer and close friend, came for her, and she resided at the Peatties' home during those three months. With her parole successfully completed in May, Cleary found an apartment for herself in downtown Chicago where she lived precariously on money coming in from the sale of her potboilers. She continued writing, working to complete another novel, "A Woman of Nebraska," which McClure's had shown interest in publishing. With magazines, such as Collier's, offering lucrative cash prizes for stories, she began entering their contests, knowing that even if she did not place, her story might still be published at a per-word rate.

Meanwhile, Cleary was helping support her children, who were in private schools or universities, and she and her husband were on friendly, but not intimate, terms. She refused to live with him, declaring, "If I had done more writing and less housekeeping I would be better off in every way today." Money trickled in regularly, and soon she could afford to begin payments on a new typewriter and lease a better room at a hotel across the street. Throughout 1904 and into 1905, Cleary's popular short stories, usually without bylines, appeared regularly in the Chicago Daily News and other syndicated newspapers.

Just as Cleary was consulting with Houghton Mifflin on the publication of a collection of her short stories, her husband suddenly entered a petition on 6 July 1905 in Cook County Court to have her declared insane and again committed to the Elgin Insane Asylum. Although the jury of seven men declared her "not insane," a shaken Cleary returned to her hotel and remained in bed. Ten days later, her husband brought her children to visit her, but an argument ensued, and Cleary became pale. As she started up to her room with her youngest son, Teddie, to give him a poem she had written especially for him, she collapsed and died. She would have celebrated her forty-second birthday the next month.

Because she was a well-known writer in Chicago and because of the dramatic events of her life and death, Cleary made front page headlines in most of the newspapers. They did not spare any details of her addiction or marital status, and although an autopsy was performed by a coroner's jury that declared the death to be due to "fatty degeneration of the heart accompanied by fatty degeneration of the liver," most people assumed her death was caused by drugs. However, Cleary had suffered from heart problems most of her life, even before her marriage, and the week that she died, Chicagoans endured record high temperature, with lists of heat-related deaths published daily in the newspapers.

Cleary's last published work was the poem she had written to give to her son as a gift. Ironically, it was published by the Record Herald along with the sensational details of her death, and, also ironically, it catalogs her overwhelming love of life and her children: "I love the world with all its brave endeavor,/ I love its winds and floods, and suns and sands,/ But oh, I love--most deeply and forever--/ The clinging touch of timid little hands." Life had simply not been long enough for Cleary.

Despite her short and troubled life, Cleary has added significantly to American literature because of the diversity of her writing. Her popular stories document the myths accepted by turn-of-the-century society, especially the sentimental cult of domesticity, and her pastoral poems echo the agrarian ideal of the frontier. Her more realistic and naturalistic works describing the hardships of the settlement period provide a contrast to the accepted myth of the West as a Garden of Eden and the pioneers as new American Adams and Eves. Cleary's strongest contribution, perhaps, is her humorous stories, sketches, and poems, especially those set in Nebraska. Her light-hearted satire and her realistic descriptions of the plains combine to paint a true picture of the West at the turn-of-the-century-- and an even truer picture of humanity.