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"The Boy's Mother" Nineteenth-Century Drug Dependence In The Life Of Kate M. Cleary, Susanne George Bloomfield

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning at age fourteen, Kate McPhelim Cleary published voluminously in turn-of-the century American periodicals and newspapers. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1863. Her father died when she was young, and her mother moved the family back to Ireland for a short time before immigrating to Philadelphia. In 1880 the McPhelim family-Kate, her mother Margaret, and her two brothers-relocated to Chicago where they supported themselves by writing. There, Kate McPhelim met and married Michael Cleary. In 1884 the newlyweds, along with Kate's mother, moved to recently established Hubbell, Nebraska, where they lived for …