Ketti Frings was born Katherine Hartley in Columbus, Ohio. By the time she entered her teens she and her family had lived in sixteen cities. Then her mother died, and Katherine went with her two sisters to live with an aunt in Milwaukee, where she attended the Lake School for Girls. After graduation she studied for one year at Principia College in St. Louis.
She started her professional career writing advertising copy, and subsequently worked as a publicist, radio script writer, and movie magazine writer. In 1938 she married Kurt Frings, who nicknamed her “Ketti”.
Hold Back the Dawn, her first screenplay, was released by Paramount in 1941. The previous year she had published her first novel, an adaptation of the screenplay, with the same title. In the following years she published short stories and, in 1944, a second novel, God's Front Porch, but most of her writing was done for Hollywood, where she turned out a steady stream of screenplays, including Guest in the House (1944), The Accused (1949), Because of You (1952), Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), and The Shrike (1955).
In 1942 her first play, Mr. Sycamore, ran briefly on Broadway. Look Homeward, Angel, adapted from Thomas Wolfe's novel, opened in 1957, ran for 564 performances, and won the New York Drama Critic Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The Long Dream, from the novel by Richard Wright, opened in 1960 to poor notices and closed after five performances.
