[3] Hauser was a difficult and mischievous child, raised during the First World War by her grandmother and a succession of governesses, while her mother ran the family business and her father worked in a German munitions plant.
Eventually she enrolled in classes at the University of Berlin law school, but didn't complete a degree, preferring instead to study dance, anthropology and hang out with artists.
In 1932, restless and horrified by the Nazis, Hauser married to escape Germany but soon abandoned her husband on Capri and moved to Paris where she began to write for newspapers.
Despite her young age, he agreed to do so and in early 1934, she departed, traveling through China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan and Hawaii, writing a weekly 1200-word feuilleton.
In her autobiographical writings she refers often to instances in her early life when she was made aware of racism, whether they occurred in British India, New York City or North Carolina.
Encouraged by her friend and Travel editor Coby Gilman Hauser began work on her first English-language novel, Dark Dominion (1947) based on her romantic relationship with a psychiatrist.
In a review article for Vogue Magazine, Marguerite Young wrote, “Marianne Hauser’s imagination is cosmopolitan, civilized, critical.
In a review, Guy Davenport wrote, "With a richness and color wholly alien to the novel in America, Marianne Hauser constructs a myth close to music in its power to move the reader from one dazzling passage to the next…"[9] In the late fifties through the early sixties Hauser divided her time between New York and Kirksville, and was friends with a group of women authors living in the West Village, Marguerite Young, Ruth Stephan, Anais Nin and Mari Sandoz.
[2] In a review, Larry McCaffery wrote, "The beauty and magic….would seem to be in the book’s extraordinary prose patterns, which create in their complex, interrelated images a sustained vision of loneliness, the desire for love and the necessity for escape, and, always, a dreamlike lyricism.
[11] Her next three books were published by Douglas Messerli's Sun and Moon Press: The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (1986), narrated by a bisexual dead man; Me and My Mom (1993), a short work dedicated to her old mentor Coby Gilman, about a daughter's difficult relationship with her mother, whom she forces into a nursing home; and a reprint of Prince Ishmael (1991).
In 2004 she published her final work, The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser (2004) with an introduction in which she discusses, among other things, masturbation in old age.
[15] She also wrote and published a story for her granddaughter, Nell Charley, Little Butter Cup, the Happiest Bear in the World, with pictures by artist Joel Fisher and music composed by Fred Kirchberger, in 2003.