Kathryn Cavarly Hulme was born in San Francisco, California, on July 6, 1900.
Kathryn Cavarly Hulme was born on July 6, 1900, in San Francisco, California, at the turn of a century that would bring sweeping changes to women's roles in society, literature, and international humanitarian work. She grew up in an era when American women were only beginning to gain broader access to higher education, professional careers, and public life, having not yet even secured the right to vote nationally.
Little is documented about her earliest childhood, but she would go on to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed the literary sensibilities and intellectual curiosity that would define her later career as a travel writer, memoirist, and novelist. Her birth in the bustling, cosmopolitan port city of San Francisco exposed her early to a world of transient sailors, immigrants, and international commerce that may have seeded her lifelong wanderlust.
Hulme would go on to live an extraordinarily peripatetic and consequential life: traveling extensively through the Mediterranean and Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s, serving with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, and ultimately authoring The Nun's Story, one of the best-selling and most culturally influential works of mid-20th-century American literature. Her birth date marks the starting point of a life that would bridge journalism, humanitarian relief, spiritual exploration, and literary achievement.