Nina Wilcox Putnam

Biography

Nina Wilcox Putnam paid the rent before she paid attention to her own dreams, punching ledgers by day so her family could eat at night. Those columns of numbers quietly shaped every April 15th ever after—her fingerprints are on the first 1040 the U.S. government ever mailed back. Headlines followed her romance with powerhouse publisher Robert Faulkner Putnam, but the byline she guarded most fiercely was her own. Between 1929 and a newsprint-sunset she let a strip called “Witty Kitty” prowl across the funny pages, then tucked a “Sunny Funny Bunny” into comic-book panels for good measure. Yet the story she never quit telling was the novel-length kind. Children curled up with “Sunny Bunny” because Johnny Gruelle’s sprightly drawings danced through her words; grown-ups reached for “Paris Love,” “Believe You Me,” and the diet-culture prophecy “Tomorrow We Diet.” A stage piece she dashed off about crop dreams became the 1933 film “Golden Harvest,” and somewhere a mummy still shuffles across screens because her 1932 screenplay breathed life into its wrapped-up star. Passports wore thin in her pocket—she measured the world in steamer trunks, not chapters—but the longest journey she ever took was the one from ledger ink to lasting ink.