Ruth Suckow was born at Hawarden in northwestern Iowa, the second daughter of Anna Kluckhohn Suckow and W. J. Suckow, a Congregational minister. Her familiarity with the small towns and cities of Iowa grew as her father accepted successive pastorates in LeMars, Algona, Fort Dodge, Manchester, Davenport, Earlville, and Forest City. For three years, from 1910 to 1913, she attended Grinnell College, published short stories and plays in the Unit, a college literary magazine, and took part in dramatic productions. She spent some months at a school of elocution in Boston before enrolling in 1915 at the University of Denver, from which she received both a bachelor's (1917) and a master's degree (1918). Her master's thesis, of which no copy seems to have survived, was reportedly on women novelists.

In Denver she learned the rudiments of beekeeping, and having established her "Orchard Apiary" at the edge of Earlville, Iowa, she managed for several...