Edith Tilton Penrose (1914-1996) received a Bachelor’s degree in 1936 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1936 she married David Burton Denhardt, who died two years later in a hunting accident, leaving her with an infant son. She moved to Baltimore and took her MA and PhD under the supervision of Fritz Machlup at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1945 she married Ernest F. Penrose, a British-born economist and writer who had been one of her teachers at Berkeley. After working for the American Embassy in London, she received her doctorate in 1950. Her first book, The Economics of the International Patent System, was published in 1951. Her most important work is considered to be The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1959.