Putnam was born Inez Coralie Wilcox in
New Haven, Connecticut on November 28, 1888 to Eleanor Sanchez Wilcox and
Marrion Wilcox. She was
homeschooled by her father, who taught English at Yale and was an editor of ''
Harper's Weekly and the Encyclopedia Americana. She had a sister, Lenor, who was five years younger than she. When Inez was 11 years old, the New York Sunday Herald'' bought a short story of hers for $5. Putnam took a job
making hats at a Fifth Avenue millinery. She married publisher Robert Faulkner Putnam in 1907, taking his last name. She drafted the first US Income Tax
1040 form for the
Internal Revenue Service in 1912. She was diagnosed with
tuberculosis and given two years to live, an experience she wrote about in 1922 in the
Saturday Evening Post. Putnam was a prolific writer, penning romances, westerns, musical comedies and
Gothic horror. She wrote pieces for
The Saturday Evening Post and had a syndicated column called "I and George" that was carried in 400 newspapers. She also wrote children's books and created a comic book series for children called Sunny Bunny. In 1928 or 1929 she began the comic strip Witty Kitty. Putnam was also a vocal advocate for
Victorian dress reform, decrying the horrors of
corsets and experimenting with her own dress designs. A 1929 video of Putnam is archived at the
University of South Carolina Libraries. In the video Putnam tells jokes and sends greetings from France. The screenplay for the 1932 film
The Mummy starring
Boris Karloff was adapted from an original story by Putnam and
Richard Schayer. The pair learned about
Alessandro Cagliostro and wrote a nine-page treatment entitled
Cagliostro. The original story, set in San Francisco, was about a 3000-year-old magician who survives by injecting nitrates. Screenwriter
John L. Balderston based his script on the story. Hollywood made several of Putnam's stories into movies, including
Graft,
A Game Chicken (1922),
The Fourth Horseman,
In Search of Arcady,
Sitting Pretty,
Slaves of Beauty,
Two Weeks With Pay,
The Beauty Prize, ''A Lady's Profession
(1933) and Golden Harvest
. She wrote the screenplay for Democracy: The Vision Restored
(1920) and the 1953 film El billetero'' was adapted from her story. She was estimated to have earned one million dollars from her writing by 1942. She was the Chairwoman of the
Palm Beach County Finnish Relief Fund and she wrote tracts for the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Putnam moved to a resort community in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, around 1946. After a long illness, the last six years of which she was confined to bed, Putnam died on March 8, 1962. ==Personal life==