Inez Kelley was born on February 14, 1918, in Kalamazoo County, Michigan, the daughter of a farmer. She enjoyed writing from an early age, and by the time she was twenty had tried her hand at playwriting, poetry, short stories, and children's books. She worked as a secretary for several years before deciding to write full-time. Her first published book was A Mother's Parting Gift to Her Daughter, which she wrote with her husband
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The book was published under the name "Inez Kelley" on January 1, 1948. It sold more than 200,000 copies in its first year of publication and went on to sell more than two million copies worldwide. Later that year she released Mama's Home Cooking, which has sold more than four million copies in book form alone.
Other titles include The Little Book of Cooking Wisdom (1953), Mama's Birthday Book (1956), Dear Mama (1960) and A Woman's Life for Me (1963).