One of the few women to rise high in the ranks of screenwriters, Frances Marion was an important silent film writer who weathered the transition to sound movies and reestablished herself as a major screenwriter. Marion had worked on a number of films before she wrote The Foundling (1916), but this script for Mary Pickford is generally considered to mark the beginning of one of the most prolific careers in Hollywood. While most filmographies give Marion credit for fewer than 150 films, estimates of the number of films attributable to her go as high as 300, including works written under various pseudonyms.

Named for her distant paternal relative, Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War's "Swamp Fox," Frances Marion Owens was born and brought up in San Francisco. She was the middle child of pianist Minnie Hall (who had studied with a student of Liszt) and the entrepreneurial Len Douglas Owens, whose father...