Louis has long attracted talented people--from Dorothy Dix, who set the tone for Ann Landers and wrote her columns from her beachfront home, to Eliza Poitevent Nicholson, who wrote under the pseudonym "Pearl Rivers" and was the first female owner of a newspaper--The Times Picayune of New Orleans.

Many moons ago, Dorothy Dix wrote an agony column in The Mirror.

These so-called "sob sisters" were Winifred Black ("Annie Laurie"), Hearst's International News Service; Elizabeth Neriwether Gilmer ("Dorothy Dix"), Hearst's New York Journal; Nixola Greeley-Smith (granddaughter of Horace Greeley), Pulitzer's New York World; and Ada Patterson, also the New York Journal.

Its author was Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, who used the pen name Dorothy Dix. Her column was later syndicated, and collections of her advice on various topics appeared in book form into the 1930s.

Dorothy Dix, before her, had written advice essays about self-respect and women's choices; "A Bintel Brief," the advice column in the Jewish Daily Forward, began with immigrants and later focused on how to stay Jewish (something Ann Landers thought about a great deal, for Jews were rare in Iowa in the 1930s).