“Hero Strong” and Other Stories

A teenaged orphan from Vermont, Mary Gibson burst onto the literary scene during the early 1850s as a star writer, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, for more than half a dozen Boston “story papers,” mass-circulation weekly periodicals that specialized in popular fiction. Although she would soon join such famous woman authors as Fanny Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth as featured contributors to the New York Ledger , America’s greatest story paper, Gibson’s subsequent output rarely matched the g