Author. Cid Ricketts Sumner received much recognition as an American author in the 20th century. She was the first wife of 1946 Nobel Prize recipient James Sumner. Although her first name was Bertha, she was published using the named Cid Ricketts Sumner. The nickname "Cid" was given to her as a child as her parents thought her to be placid. She was homeschooled by her mother and grandmother before entering high school at age twelve. She received a B.S. degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909, and the following year she received an M.A. from Columbia University in New York City. From 1911 through 1912, she continued postgraduate studies at Columbia. In 1914, she enrolled as a medical student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, but remained on that course of study for only one year as she met her husband, a professor at the college. They were married on July 20, 1915. After her marriage, she became a full-time wife and mother of four children. Later, she attended summer lectures in Oxford, England. She first started writing at age 18 for a newspaper and resumed writing when her children were school age. After her divorced in 1930, she started teaching high school English and French at Millsaps College. In 1938 she published her first novel, "Ann Singleton," with little success. During World War II, she was employed at a munition plant. She wrote her second novel "Quality" during this time waiting for the war to end. The theme of the second novel was about an African-American young lady, who left the South to go North for work. Her skin was so pale, that she passed for a Caucasian, entering an "all-white" nursing school, and had a romantic encounter with a white physician. The novel received criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but the novel was eventually adapted in 1949 into the three-time Academy Award nominated film, "Pinky." The movie was not accepted well in the segregated South, to the point of censoring the film from being viewed by the public and prosecuting theater owners for showing it. This eventually led to the Federal Supreme Court decision addressing the freedom of speech in a film and overturning the censoring. In 1948 Sumner published "Tammy out of Time," which followed with "Tammy, Tell Me True" in 1959 and "Tammy in Rome" in 1965. Her novels were adapted to a series of movies about the character Tammy: "Tammy and the Bachelor" in 1957, "Tammy Tell Me True" in 1961, and "Tammy and the Doctor" in 1963. A short-lived 1965 television series loosely based on Sumner's Tammy character was edited into "Tammy and the Millionaire" in 1967. The Academy Award nominated ballad from the movies, "Tammy," was #1 on the Top Ten Hits for five weeks during the summer of 1957, giving vocalist Debbie Reynolds a Gold Record. She wrote eight other novels: "But the Morning Will Come" in 1949, "Sudden Glory" in 1951, "The Hornbeam Tree" in 1953, "Traveler in the Wilderness" and "View from the Hill" in 1957, "Christmas Gift" in 1959, and "Withdraw Thy Foot" and "Saddle Your Dreams" in 1964. Besides her novels, she wrote a number of short stories as well as non-fiction travel books. Opening the front door in her robe and slippers, she was beaten to death about her head with a hammer while at her summer home on the Massachusetts coast. Her novel "Withdraw Thy Foot" was based on a theme of brutal murder on the Massachusetts coast with the investigation led by a female schoolteacher. Her 16-year-old grandson reported the murder, was later arrested for the crime, sentenced in a close court to a juvenile center and years later, committed suicide.