Edith Summers Kelley (April 28, 1884 – June 9, 1956) was a Canadian-born author who lived and worked in the United States, and is best known for her 1923 novel Weeds, set in the hills of Kentucky.
[1] Kelley was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Scottish immigrants[1] and graduated from the University of Toronto before moving to Greenwich Village where she met Upton Sinclair, who offered her a job at Helicon Home Colony.
They were engaged for two years, but she married his roommate, a poet and novelist named Allan Updegraff.
[2] Weeds was conceived while she and Fred Kelley lived on a tobacco farm in Scott County, Kentucky.
[1] It had some positive reviews but no commercial success; a second novel, The Devil's Hand, written while she and Kelley lived in Imperial Valley, California, was left unfinished, and was not printed until 1974.