In the 1910s and 1920s, women's magazines published fiction by well-known writers, including Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, and Edna Ferber.
[1] During this era, the short story "Old Man Minick" was one of a variety of works first published serially in women's periodicals and then developed into plays and film.
[2] The story is set in Chicago in the early 20th century, where a seventy year-old widower, Jo Minick, has to learn how to live, after the unexpected death of his wife, to whom he had been married for forty years.
One day Minick overhears Nettie telling her friends that she can't have a child because she is looking after her father-in-law.
The story was adapted into the 1924 Broadway play, Minick, by Ferber and George S. Kaufman,[3][4][5] and published by Doubleday, Page & Company, in 1924.