Kathleen Norris

American novelist and short-story writer Kathleen Norris was born Kathleen Thompson into a wealthy family in San Francisco, CA, in 1880. Her father was a bank executive and was twice president of the famous (or infamous) Bohemian Club of San Francisco. Kathleen and her siblings were educated at the family estate in Mill Valley, CA, called "Treehaven" (later the name and setting for one of her novels) by tutors and governesses. The family's fortunes took a turn for the worse when Kathleen became a teenager, however, when her mother suddenly died of pneumonia and her father died less than a month later; the family was left almost destitute. She took a variety of jobs, including bookkeeper, schoolteacher and sales clerk. She would invent stories to tell her siblings in order to occupy their time, and to make some spare money she submitted one of them to the local newspaper, the San Francisco Argonaut, and it was accepted and published. It wasn't long before she became the society reporter for the Evening Bulletin newspaper, and spent two years as a reporter on the San Francisco Call.

In 1909 she married novelist Charles Norris, the brother of famed novelist Frank Norris. They moved to New York City, where he was art editor of the "American Magazine". She submitted a story to the "Atlantic Monthly" magazine and it was accepted. It wasn't long before she was getting stories published in a variety of different magazines, and she became a prolific writer. She and her family eventually moved back to California, settling in the town of Saratoga, in the Santa Cruz Mountains.