Edith A. How

Edith A. How is a little-documented early twentieth-century author associated with People of Africa, first published in 1921. Online catalog and author records consistently connect her name with that book, and some reference pages describe her as an anthropologist as well as a writer.

Because reliable biographical material is scarce, it is hard to sketch much of her personal life with confidence. What can be said is that her surviving reputation seems to rest almost entirely on People of Africa, a brief nonfiction work that has remained available through library, bookseller, and public-domain listings.

That scarcity of detail makes her one of those authors known mainly through the work itself. For listeners coming to her today, the interest lies less in a full life story than in the window her book offers into how Africa was presented to English-language readers in the early 1900s.