Nina Wilcox Putnam

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1888, she was educated at home and published her first short story in 1907. Over the course of her career, she became one of those writers who seemed able to do almost everything: fiction, magazine work, newspaper columns, plays, screenwriting, serials, comic books, and children’s literature.

Sources on her life describe an astonishing output—more than 500 short stories and around 1,000 magazine articles. She is especially remembered as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, and many of her stories were adapted for film. Her work reached a wide popular audience, and her long career shows how comfortably she worked across both print culture and early Hollywood.

She died in 1962. Her papers are preserved at Yale, where archival records note her family background, early education, and writing career, offering a glimpse of a remarkably energetic American author whose work once appeared almost everywhere readers looked.