 Born in 1910 in Storm Lake, Iowa, to tractor salesman Sam Holmes and his wife, Marjorie Holmes began writing as a teenager, selling her first story during the Great Depression before graduating from Cornell College in 1931.She met engineering student Lynn Mighell (pronounced mile), a native of Holstein, at a writers' workshop at the University of Iowa.They married in 1932, living first in McLean then Manassas, Virginia, and had four children, including a daughter named Melanie.