Vicki Baum (1888-1960) was one of the world's first best-selling woman authors, a screen writer, and a boxer. She was born in Vienna to a Jewish family and emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s to escape the rise of the National Socialists. Her literary works were denigrated in Germany and Austria as sensationalist and amoral and banned in the Third Reich as of 1935.

Baum wrote the famous novel Menschen im Hotel [People in the Hotel] published in 1929, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film, Grand Hotel (1932), starring John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo. Other notable works include Die Anderen Tage [The Other Days] (1922), Liebe und Tod auf Bali [Love and Death in Bali] (1937), and Es War Alles Ganz Anders [It Was All Quite Different] (1962) -- her memoir, which was published posthumously. The internet movie database imdb.com credits Baum with 37 works.

Baum is also known as a boxer. She trained with Turkish prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his studio in Berlin. In her memoir she wrote, "I don’t know how the feminine element sneaked into those masculine realms [of boxing], but in any case, only three or four of us were tough enough to go through with it." She credited her hard work to the skills instilled in Mahir's boxing studio.