1861-1951
Advice Columnist

"Mother Confessor to Millions."

Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer started her column "Dorothy Dix Talks" in New Orleans in 1896. It lasted until her death in 1951, making her probably the best-known woman writer of her era. William Randolph Hearst lured her from New Orleans to his New York Journal at the turn of the century, and with his syndication operations, her readership eventually reached some sixty million throughout the world.

Poor in the New South.

Elizabeth Meriwether grew up in a poor but cultivated Tennessee family after the Civil War. When she was twenty-one, she married her stepmother's brother, a charming but emotionally unstable man who could not hold a job. The marriage was unhappy, but they never divorced. Faced with the need to support her family, she began to work as a freelance writer. Eliza Nicholson, publisher of the New Orleans Picayune, recognized the thirty-three-year-old's...