About Nell Brinkley

Name variants

Nell Mac Rae
  • Biography

    Artist Nell Brinkley's Brinkley Girls, were the delightful, bright-eyed and bow-lipped women of her newspaper columns throughout the early 1900s. The Brinkley Girls became household names across America.

    Nell Brinkley was born in Edgewater, Colorado on September 5, 1886. At the age of 17 she left home to pursue a career as an artist. After failing at her first job with the Denver Post, she went to art school for two years. She later worked for the Denver Times and after two years of drawing pretty girls for the paper she was discovered by William Randolph Hearst and hired as an illustrator for his newspaper the New York Evening Journal.

    At the Journal, Nell Brinkley illustr...

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