Elsie Lee (1912–1987)

Elsie Lee, née Williams, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Byron Williams, Jr., a telephone engineer, and his wife Helen.

Elsie attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the Pratt Institute in New York. In 1941, she married Morton Lee. She worked as a librarian, executive secretary, and office manager. She mentioned in her book Elsie Lee's Book of Simple Gourmet Cookery (1971) that she lived in Washington for six years, and in Hollywood for three. In the 1940s, she sold her first stories to the Ladies Home Journal, and she went on to publish some three dozen novels, many of them romance novels, as well as works of non-fiction. She used a variety of pseudonyms, including Elsie Cromwell, Norman Daniels, Jane Gordon, and Lee Sheridan.