to support” had its origins in 1932 from a suggestion by fellow writer James McGuiness, and went through numerous plot and character permutations during the years of the Great Depression. Mildred Pierce is the third of his four novels in which Cain incorporated Grand opera, for which he had trained as a baritone in his youth. Kate Cummings, mother of Hollywood actress Constance Cummings, became a friend, a lover and a literary advisor to Cain during the writing of Mildred Pierce. Their relationship ended in 1943, in part due to Cain’s heavy drinking. Cummings provided Cain with insights essential to the development of his female protagonists in Mildred Pierce. Cain freely acknowledged that Cummings “saw me through” the writing of his “first serious novel.” By November 1941 Cain had completed two-thirds of the novel, but was struggling with adapting to writing in the third-person, his first effort in that narrative form. Cain wrote publisher Blanche Knopf in 1940: The novel required four rewrites before Cain completed Mildred Pierce in the Spring of 1941 and sold it to Alfred A. Knopf publishers on a $5000 advance. Critical response Mildred Pierce was released in September 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf publishers, Literary critic Edmund Wilson introduced the novel in an essay for The New Republic entitled “The Boys in the Back Room.” Biographer Ray Hoopes observed that Wilson’s measured praise “was the first suggestion by a major American critic that Cain had edged his way into the front ranks of American authors.” Cain's unsavory characterizations of Mildred and Veda were controversial, but the novel’s plot lacked the sensational devices that many of his fans anticipated. Retail Bookseller predicted that “James Cain fans are likely to find Mildred Pierce decidedly mild and tame.” Reviews of Mildred Pierce were mixed, but on the whole favorable. Never a best-seller, first editions had sold 11,000 hard-cover copies which quickly increased to 14,000 after several weeks. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in reprint by 1945, Theme The theme of the novel derives from Cain’s female protagonist, Mildred Pierce, a housewife who “uses men to gain her ends”, in achieving financial success as a restaurateur. Mildred’s daughter Veda, in turn, manipulates her mother to advance her musical ambitions. The elements of “food, finance and mothering” appear forcefully, as they did in earlier works, especially Cain’s 1937 novel Serenade. The social and economic hardships of the depression