"With stories and novels such as "Humoresque," Back Street, and Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst reigned as the leading "sob sister" of American fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Her name on the cover of a magazine was enough to sell out an issue. She wrote of immigrants and shopgirls, love, drama, and trauma, and in no time the title "World's Highest-Paid Short-Story Writer" attached itself to her name.

Hollywood fattened her bank account, making her works into films thirty-one times in forty years."--BOOK JACKET.

"Fannie Hurst lent her prominence and pen to the day's significant socialist, liberal, humanitarian, and feminist causes. She became a forceful supporter of the rights of African Americans, and was an early friend and literary advocate of Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West. Her life seems to have intersected with everyone of significance in her era, in science, the arts, the media, Hollywood, academia, and politics."--BOOK JACKET.

"In examining the life of this great, celebrated, and yet now nearly forgotten woman, Brooke Kroeger also explores the curious backslide in the progress of women in general from the Depression to the mid-1960s."--BOOK JACKET.