In several senses, the 1841 killing of Mary Rogers was America's first great media murder. When the former
Manhattan "cigar girl" was found floating in the Hudson River in July, she was already renowned throughout the city for her beauty and for a previous unexplained disappearance. But in the tabloid fever of penny
newspaper wars, her posthumous fame swept the nation. To capitalize on the frenzy, struggling writer
Edgar Allan Poe constructed "The Mystery of Marie Roget," a thinly veiled fiction based on the case. In
The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Edgar winner Daniel Stashower artfully interweaves the almost equally tragic stories of a doomed young woman and a deeply troubled genius.
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Background Information
Manhattan Borough is essentially the Island of Manhattan, site of New Amsterdam and the commercial center of New York City. The earliest papers in colonial times were single sheets, but newspapers developed into the primary mass local media before radio and television.
