Rinehart, Mary Roberts [key], 1876–1958, American novelist, b. Pittsburgh. A graduate nurse, she married Dr. Stanley M. Rinehart in 1896. The first of her many mystery stories, The Circular Staircase (1908), established her as a leading writer of the genre; Rinehart and Avery Hopwood successfully dramatized the novel as The Bat (1920). Her other mystery novels include The Man in Lower Ten (1909), The Case of Jennie Brice (1914), The Red Lamp (1925), The Door (1930), The Yellow Room (1945), and The Swimming Pool (1952). Stories about “Tish,” a self-reliant spinster, first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and were collected into The Best of Tish (1955).
See Rinehart's autobiography (1931, rev. ed. 1948).
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