¿Hero Strong¿ and Other Stories

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. "Hero Strong” and Other Stories does much more than recover the work of a forgotten literary prodigy. As Daniel A. Cohen argues, Gibson's tales also illuminate major interrelated transformations in American girlhood and American women's authorship.