Mary Wickham Bond (1898–1997)

Mary Fanning Wickham Bond was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Dana Hall School in 1916. She later took courses at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania. She was accepted to Bryn Mawr College around the time of World War I, but instead volunteered as an emergency aid nurse and air raid warden. In 1930, she married Shippen Lewis, a lawyer. She wrote poetry, magazine articles, short stories, and novels, including Device and Desire (1950), a bestseller. She also founded, edited, and wrote for the Chestnut Hill Local, a weekly Philadelphia newspaper. In 1954, following the death of her first husband, she remarried to James Bond, an ornithologist. The couple spent their winters in the West Indies, where Bond wrote Birds of the West Indies. After reading the book, novelist Ian Fleming took the author's name for his master spy character.