Jean Guttery was born in Hankow, China, on November 16, 1915. Her parents Arthur and Myrtle Guttery were missionaries for the YMCA. In about 1928, she and her Why Not, Lafayette?

family left China to escape the warfare that swept through China as part of the aftermath of the revolution that removed the old monarchy and replaced it with a fragile civilian government. While in China, she kept a notebook of her thoughts and obser vations that later served as a basis for writing about China. Guttery's writings about her own life reveal a nostalgia for China.

After she graduated from Wheaton College in 1937, Guttery took a job with an advertising agency in New York, but she left it to work for a textbook publisher, Silver Burdett Company. She married Michael Fritz on November 1, 1941, just in time for him to be called to military service and sent...