Nell Kimball Her Life as an American Madam, by Herself

A witty, wild-spirited, purely American autobiography by a prostitute-turned-madam who lived and operated at the turn of the twentieth century.

“Looking back on my life, and it’s the only way I can look at it now, nothing in it came out the way most people would want their life to be lived. And while I began at fifteen in a good house with no plans, just wanting as a young whore to hunker on to something to eat and something good to wear, I ended up as a business woman, becoming a sporting house madam, recruiting, disciplining whores, running high-class places. Always wondering, too, why it had happened just that way. Now I can say, if I ever had me any remorse, I never had any regrets.”

So begin the remarkable reminiscences of Nell Kimball. From her beginnings as a young hooker in St. Louis, to life as a madam in New Orleans, wide-open San Francisco, and back again in the polite soft-spoken corruption of New Orleans, Kimball recounts her own American success story while training a knowing eye on America at large.

With its down-to-earth, straight-shooting American eloquence, this shrewd, uninhibited, and frequently comic autobiography, as edited by Stephen Longstreet, reads like a cross between Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles.

Nell Kimball (1854–1934) was a writer and madam. During her career she operated brothels in San Francisco and New Orleans. She retired from the trade in 1917. The exact time and place of her death is unknown. 

Stephen Longstreet (1907–2002) was a prolific artist and author of fiction, nonfiction, stage plays, and screenplays. Among his written works are the novels The Sisters Liked Them Handsome, which was adapted into the Broadway musical High Button Shoes, and Stallion Road, which was adapted into a film of the same name.