Born in Portland on July 9, 1811, Sara Payson Willis would go on to build a career under the pen name Fanny Fern that spanned fiction, journalism, essays, humor, and writing for children — an unusually wide range for any writer of her era.

Willis adopted the pseudonym Fanny Fern as she established herself as a working writer in the United States. Over the course of her career she worked across several distinct forms: as a journalist filing regular columns, as a novelist producing longer fiction, and as an essayist whose prose carried a notably comic edge that placed her firmly in the tradition of American humorous writing. She also wrote for younger readers, making her one of the relatively few writers of her period to move comfortably between adult and children's audiences. Throughout her career she wrote in English, and her output was rooted in the American literary culture of the nineteenth century.

Fanny Fern died in Manhattan on October 10, 1872, having spent her professional life under a name that the Library of Congress continues to record in its name authority file as "Fern, Fanny, 1811-1872" — a cataloguing detail that reflects the extent to which the pen name, rather than her birth name of Sara Payson Willis, became the identity most firmly attached to her work. That institutional recognition stands as a concrete marker of how thoroughly the Fanny Fern byline defined her public presence.