Mama's Bank Account

Product Description
The charming adventures of the Mama of an immigrant Norwegian family living in San Francisco. This bestselling book inspired the play, motion picture, and television series I Remember Mama.


About the Author
Kathryn McLean née Anderson (March 20, 1908 - May 15, 1966), best known by her pen name Kathryn Forbes, was an American writer and memoirist.

Forbes was a radio scriptwriter and later began publishing short stories in national magazine. Her best known work was Mama's Bank Account, a fictionalized memoir about a Norwegian family in 1920s San Francisco. Her heartwarming stories focused on their simple aspirations and often difficult struggles, dreams and determinations, happiness and sorrows.

Forbes' book served as the inspiration for John Van Druten's 1944 play I Remember Mama, which subsequently became a 1948 film, a popular long-running television series as well as a Broadway musical.

In 1947, she published another novel, Transfer Point, regarding the daughter of divorced parents. Unlike Mama's Bank Account, for which she drew on the experiences of her Norwegian-born grandmother, the later novel was closer to Forbes' real-life childhood.