Elizabeth Higgins Sullivan


Elizabeth Higgins Sullivan, was an early 20th century American woman author and playwright. She was born in Columbus, Nebraska to Judge John G. Higgins and Anna O'Connor. Her siblings are John, Joy, Edward, Frank, Pansy, Mary, Andrea, Andrew, and Kathleen. Three of her siblings passed in infancy.
Elizabeth married Florence Edward Sullivan on April 11, 1896, in Omaha, Nebraska. Soon after, her daughter, Janette was born in 1906. The couple divorced and she did not remarry. She published her stories under her maiden name of Elizabeth Higgins.
Sullivan worked for the Omaha Daily Bee newspaper and various Chicago daily newspapers. She was devoted to women's suffrage and the social settlement movement. She had a special interest in horticulture and wrote numerous articles on horticulture and agriculture in the American South. She maintained a home in the Mobile, Alabama area for a part of the year, later in life. She is listed in the 1916 Blue Book of Nebraska Women by Winona Reeves under the Sullivan surname.
An entry in the 1916 Blue Book of Nebraska Women page 218 reads:

Career

Sullivan worked for several newspapers and schools including the Omaha Bee newspaper, Omaha Daily News, South End Music School, and University Players of Cape Cod and Baltimore. She was a reporter, social worker, and art director. Working with her sister Joy, a distinguished teacher of dramatics who, through the University Players of Boston and New York, helped to start many prominent stage and screen stars on their way to the top.
Her book Out of the West, a Novel by Elizabeth Higgins was written in 1902. It is "A captivating story of a young woman's journey from the rural West to the vibrant city of San Francisco in the early 1900s. Full of vivid descriptions and colorful characters, this novel explores themes of identity, love, and self-discovery."
The book was digitized in June 2014 from the original held at the New York Public Library. Several modern reprints have been done on her work, as it is in the public domain, and her work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is therefore "important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public".
She is an alumna of Dr. George Pierce Baker's Workshop 47 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1925, her play "The Strongest Man" was called "Best of Series" from other Workshop 47 entries.

Selected bibliography