Laura E. Richards

Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards (1850-1943) was born in Boston to Samuel Gridley Howe, who organized and first directed the Perkins Institution for the Blind, and Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". She married Henry Richards, settled in Gardiner, Maine, and wrote more than ninety books, best remembered now for the nonsense rhyme "Eletelephony" and the novel "Captain January" (1891). With her sisters Maud Howe Elliott and Florence Howe Hall she wrote a life of their mother; in 1917 the Pulitzer Prize for Biography went to Richards and Elliott, the first women to win a Pulitzer.