Cora, the title character, is the first choice of all the men in the small mid-western town. She knows this and is a like a kid in a candy store. She constantly flirts with one man and then runs to another when the excitement wears off.

Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist from Indiana best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novels Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons, which also became a film by Orson Welles. Tarkington chronicled Midwestern American life, and the changes wrought by the economic boom times following the Civil War and up to World War I.