Edith Summers Kelley was a Canadian-born novelist who spent much of her adult life living and working in the United States. Born in Toronto to Scottish immigrant parents, she graduated from the University of Toronto before relocating to Greenwich Village in New York. There, she became involved in the vibrant literary and intellectual scene of the early twentieth century. She worked for Upton Sinclair at the Helicon Home Colony, where she met Sinclair Lewis, to whom she was engaged for two years. She eventually married poet and novelist Allan Updegraff, supporting their family by teaching night school before their divorce.\n\nKelley later partnered with artist Fred Kelley, with whom she traveled across the United States. Her experiences living on a tobacco farm in Scott County, Kentucky, inspired her most famous work, the 1923 novel Weeds. Although the book received positive critical reviews for its realistic portrayal of rural life, it was a commercial failure.\n\nThe couple later relocated to the Imperial Valley in California, which served as the setting for her second novel, The Devil's Hand. Kelley left the manuscript unfinished, and it remained unpublished during her lifetime, eventually seeing print in 1974, nearly two decades after her death in 1956.
