Jean Guttery was born in Hankow, China, on November 16, 1915. Her parents, Arthur and Myrtle Guttery, were missionaries for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Around 1928, she and her family left China to escape the warfare that swept through country in the aftermath of the revolution that removed the old monarchy and replaced it with a fragile civilian government. While in China, she kept a notebook of her thoughts and observations that later served as a basis for writing about China. Guttery's writings about her own life reveal a nostalgia for China.

After she graduated from Wheaton College in 1937, she took a job with an advertising agency in New York, but left it to work for a textbook publisher, Silver Burdett Company. She married Michael Fritz on November 1, 1941, just in time for him to be called to military service and sent to San Francisco, after...