[3][4][5] Lambert Dunbar was a flour merchant from Portland, Oregon, who emigrated to Hong Kong early in the 20th century to manage a family business there.

In the 1940s and 1950s she was an executive secretary and publicist for New York's American National Theatre and Academy and the Woodstock Playhouse,[19][15] and established an agency that handled television scripts.

[2][25] Her debut novel, The Landscape of Dreams (1960), a semi-autobiographical[1][26] story of a girl raised in China and the United States, was described in Kirkus Reviews as "a sensitive first novel.

"[27] Her 1961 book The Single Secret, a narrative of a female mental patient and her physician, was praised in The New York Times as "a remarkable novel" and the work of "an exceptionally skilled and perceptive novelist.

[9] Savory also published many English translations of French and German writers and poets, including Jacques Prévert, Guillevic, and Günter Eich.