Dorothea Frances Canfield was born in Lawrence, Kansas, the daughter of Flavia Camp Canfield, an artist, and James Hulme Canfield, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas. She spent much of her childhood in travel. Mrs. Canfield had a studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where Dorothy Canfield, at the age of ten, was exposed to both bohemia and French convent schools. She received her Ph.B. from Ohio State University in 1899, studied at the Sorbonne, and then took her Ph.D. in Romance languages from Columbia in 1904, with a dissertation entitled Corneille and Racine in England. When in 1906, a textbook, Elementary Composition, coauthored with George R. Carpenter, was published, she seemed destined for a brilliant academic career. But the year 1907 changed the course of her life: her first novel, Gunhild, was published; she married John Redwood Fisher, former captain of the Columbia football team...