'Hick' explores Eleanor Roosevelt's long-rumored romance with reporter Lorena Hickok

In the new biography “Hick,” author Sarah Miller explores the deeply intimate relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and trailblazing journalist Lorena Hickok.

Trailblazing journalist Lorena Hickok started working as a reporter in 1912, at a time when only about 1 in 5 women in the United States had jobs outside the home and their right to vote was still years away. It was that career that led Hickok to someone who would change her professional and personal life forever: Eleanor Roosevelt.

In the new biography “Hick,” the title an ode to its subject’s nickname, author Sarah Miller explores Hickok’s impoverished Midwestern upbringing, her illustrious professional career in the country’s largest cities and the relationship that would come to define her legacy.

Miller said she was inspired to write about Hickok and her association with Roosevelt after reading conflicting accounts about the nature of their decadeslong relationship. The women exchanged letters with each other, sometimes twice daily, from 1932 until Roosevelt’s death in 1962. Hickok donated thousands of these letters to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and they were made public in 1978, a decade after her death. Their 30-year correspondence provided unique insight into their relationship, but those who read the letters and went on to write about them afterward interpreted them in vastly different ways — from strictly platonic to deeply romantic.

"Hick" by Sarah Miller.Penguin Random House“So you read all those things, and if you’re a person like me, you’re like, ‘OK but who’s right? What is this relationship, really?’ And the best way to do that is to go and read the letters, all of them, with your own eyes,” Miller said.

During her research for “Hick,” which comes out Tuesday, Miller read about 3,500 letters between the two women. Her conclusion falls onto the romantic side of the spectrum, but a romance rooted in friendship.