Rose Franken was a celebrated Broadway playwright and director, a Hollywood screenwriter, and a popular novelist whose fiction touched a sympathetic chord in American women. After two of her plays that offered social commentary earned adverse criticism and low box office receipts, she elected to return to her winning formula for commercial success in other genres. She later said that the character of Claudia, her most famous creation, had overshadowed her. The sentimental prose that made her name a household word, however, has taken second place in her critical reputation to the plays.

She was born Rosebud Dougherty Lewin on 28 December 1895 in Gainesville, Texas. Shortly after her birth, her parents, Hannah (née Younker) and Michael Lewin, a businessman, separated. She and her older siblings (two brothers and one sister) were raised by her mother in the Younker family brownstone in Harlem, New York City. After leaving...