Neilson Carel Debevoise was an American historian of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran, and subsequently a military intelligence officer. Born in 1903 in Jersey City, he studied at the University of Illinois, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, "Parthian Problems", under the supervision of Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead in 1929. In 1938, he published A Political History of Parthia, a seminal history of the Parthian Empire. He joined the US Military Intelligence Service during World War II; in the course of the war he was posted in Egypt. He continued his work in intelligence in the postwar period, abandoning his academic career—his last journal contribution was published in 1947—and he worked for the Department of State and the National Security Council into the 1960s. Little is known of his activities in this capacity, though he was a member of the Operations Coordinating Board in 1954–58. He died in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on December 10, 1992.
Neith Boyce was an American novelist, journalist, and theatre artist. Much of Boyce’s earlier work was published with help from her parents, Mary and Henry Harrison Boyce. Neith Boyce later co-founded the Provincetown Players alongside Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, her husband Hutchins Hapgood, and others. Boyce worked with the Provincetown Players in several capacities that included directing, performing, hosting productions in her home, and having all four of her plays produced. Boyce’s plays featured plots that focused on women’s sexuality, personal relationships, and agency.
Nell Mary Dunn is an English playwright, screenwriter and author. She is known especially for a volume of short stories, Up the Junction, and a novel, Poor Cow.
Nell Leyshon is a British writer whose work alternates between prose, stage and radio drama. She was born and grew up in Somerset, and spent half of her childhood in Glastonbury, and the other half in a small farming village on the edge of the Somerset Levels. She had a mixed education, and ended up attending art college for a year before moving to London. A first career culminated in working as a Production Assistant then Producer in TV commercials for directors including Ridley and Tony Scott. She gave it up to spend a year in Spain with her boyfriend Dominic, who remains her partner. She returned pregnant. She attended the University of Southampton as a mature student. Only after the birth of her second son in 1995 she started to write seriously.
Helen "Nell" Louise Zink is an American writer living in Germany. After being a long term penpal of Avner Shats, she came to prominence in her fifties with the help of Jonathan Franzen and her novel, Mislaid, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut The Wallcreeper was released in the United States by the independent press Dorothy and named one of 100 notable books of 2014 by The New York Times, as was Mislaid. Zink then released Nicotine, Private Novelist and Doxology through Ecco Press. In 2022 she published Avalon, again a New York Times notable book, with Alfred A. Knopf.
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.
