Born in 1914, Elizabeth Ann Christman, who grew up in the Saint Louis area, finished her bachelor's degree at Webster College in 1935. She served in the WAVES in World War II and after the war worked for the New York literary agency Harold Ober Associates. She earned a master's degree from New York University in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972. She started teaching English at DePauw University and, during the summer session, at the University of Notre Dame. In 1976 she became a fulltime teacher at Notre Dame, best known for her course in book publishing, in which students found appropriate manuscripts and took them through all the steps to produce a published book. She published short work in magazines starting in the 1930s; in the 1970s and 1980s she wrote four novels and published them with Morrow, Paulist Press, and Dodd, Mead. She died 4 February 2010.