Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 - August 17, 1935) was a prominent American writer, humanist, and lecturer for social reform.  She was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father abandoned the family when she was an infant; her mother, unable to manage, consigned her children to the care of her aunts, one of whom was author Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Isolated and impoverished, she received little formal education but found refuge in the public library studying ancient civilizations. With the help of her father she attended the Rhode Island School of Design and became a painter, tutor and artist of trade cards.  She married in 1884 and suffered a bout of post-partum depression after the birth of her only child, an experience that inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” six years later.  She separated from her husband in 1888, moved to California and immersed herself in reformist and feminist activities.  Although “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in The New England Magazine in 1892, it was In This Our World, a book of satiric poems published in 1893, which brought her recognition. She returned to the east that same year, married Houghton Gilman and went on to lecture throughout the country for the next twenty years on women’s issues, human rights and social reform. She published Women and Economics in 1898, The Home: Its Work and Influence in 1903, and the utopian feminist novel Herland in 1915.  She wrote and edited her own magazine, The Forerunner, from 1909-1916 and wrote hundreds of articles for newspapers.  In 1925 she began her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which was published after her death in 1935.