At Wit's End

Erma Louise Bombeck (née Fiste; February 21, 1927 – April 22, 1996) was born in Bellbrook, Ohio, to a working-class family, and was raised in Dayton. She was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper humor column describing suburban home life, syndicated from 1965 to 1996. Fifteen books of her humor have been published; most became bestsellers. Between 1965 and April 17, 1996 – five days before her death – Bombeck wrote over four thousand newspaper columns, using broad and sometimes eloquent humor, chronicling the ordinary life of a Midwestern suburban housewife. By the 1970s, her columns were read semi-weekly by 30 million readers of the nine hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada. Her work stands as a humorous chronicle of middle-class life in America after World War II, among the generation of parents who produced the Baby Boomers.