Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Thompson Norris (July 16, 1880 – January 18, 1966) was a popular American novelist and newspaper columnist. She was one of the most widely read and highest paid female writers in the United States for nearly fifty years, from 1911 to 1959. Her stories appeared in the Atlantic, The American Magazine, McClure's, Everybody's, Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion, and she wrote 93 novels, many of which were best sellers. She used her fiction to promote values including the sanctity of marriage, the nobility of motherhood, and the importance of service to others.

Life and career

Norris was born and died in San Francisco, California. When she was 19 both her parents died, and as the oldest sibling she became effectively the head of a large family. She had to become a breadwinner, and worked in a department store followed by an accounting office and then the Mechanic's Institute Library. She began writing short stories, and in 1905 enrolled in a creative writing program at the University of California, Berkeley. In September 1906 the San Francisco Call, which had published a few of her stories, hired her to write a society column. In the course of that work she met Charles Gilman Norris (whose late older brother was the famous novelist Frank Norris), and they soon fell in love. He moved to New York to be art editor of The American Magazine. After eight months of daily correspondence and some improvements in her family's financial situation, she joined him there and they were married in April 1909.