Sara Payson Willis Parton, known to her readers as Fanny Fern, was the first American woman newspaper columnist and the most highly paid newspaper writer of her time. Her popular columns appeared regularly for twenty-one years and were reprinted throughout the United States and Great Britain. She was also the best-selling author of two novels, six books of essays, a novella, and three collections for children. In 1853 she originated the now-familiar saying, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." A pioneer in the use of the vernacular and understatement, writing in a frank, satirical style that defied convention, Fern was acclaimed by Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1854 as the welcome harbinger of a new writing style, which, the editors hoped, marked the end of the "stilted rhetoric" and "parade and pomp" of literature. Stripping the facade of convention from some of society's most sacred institutions...