Fannie Hurst was born in Hamilton, Ohio, the daughter of a successful shoe manufacturer. Her parents were Bavarian-Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1860. Hurst was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and received her A.B. degree from Washington University in 1909. She went to Columbia University in New York for graduate courses in 1910. She wanted to be a writer, both to support herself and to study people, she worked as a waitress and as a salesgirl. She also did bit acting roles in the theater, attended night court and studied people on the street. Although she was not a radical, she was interested in social issues such as equal pay for equal work, the right of a woman to retain her name after marriage, relief of the oppressed Jews in Eastern Europe, and the social and medical problems of homosexuals. Her first story, "Ain't Life Wonderful," was published in a St. Louis newspaper called Reedy's Weekly while she was attending college. Her second story, published in 1912, earned recognition for her writing talent, and the Saturday Evening Post wanted all of her future stories. In 1915 she married a pianist named Jacques S. Danielson. She continued to write, and her novels and stories were eagerly greeted by the publishing world so that by 1925, she and Booth Tarkington were the highest paid writers in the United States. She chaired a national housing commission, 1936-37; the committee on workmen's compensation in 1940, a member of the national advisory committee to the Works Progress Administration, 1940-41; and she was a member of the board of directors of New York Urban League. In 1952, her husband Danielson died, and she became a delegate to the World Health Organization. Over the course of her fifty-year career she wrote seventeen novels, nine volumes of short stories, three plays, and many articles.