Nora Bryant McCue was born on February 19, 1880, at Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar and Lily Bryant Head McCue. Her family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, when she was a small child, where her father worked for a local railroad line and later as a clerk at the federal courthouse. Nora was the salutatorian of her senior class at Madison Central High School in 1898 and went on to attend the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in history. It was said that Nora, who was a tall, striking brunette, cut quite a figure on campus while walking Cedric, her Great Dane. Nora's father was appalled when a few years earlier she had spent $50 of her savings to purchase Cedric, then a two-month-old puppy. On August 1, 1904, she married Henry Elmer Willsie, in Madison. Willsie was a consulting mining engineer and inventor who would later help develop a gas mask for the military during World War I. It was while she and her husband were living in Arizona that Nora began her writing career by submitting western stories and articles under the name "Honore Willsie" to Collier's magazine and Harper's Weekly. Her first novel, "Heart of the Desert: Kut-Le of the Desert", was published in 1913. The following year she began a five-year stint as editor of The Delineator, a women's magazine about "Fashion, Fine Arts and Culture".