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Farmer was born in Seattle, to Ernest Melvin Farmer and Cora Lillian (Van Ornum) Farmer. In 1931, while attending West Seattle High School, she entered and won $100 from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, with her controversial essay "God Dies".[1] It was a precocious attempt to reconcile her wish for, in her words, a "superfather" God, with her observations of a chaotic and godless world. In her autobiography she writes that the essay was influenced by her reading of Nietzsche, who "expressed the same doubts, only he said it in German: "Gott ist Tot." God is dead. This I could understand. I was not to assume that there was no God, but I could find no evidence in my life that He existed or that He had ever shown any particular interest in me. I was not an atheist, but I was surely an agnostic, and by the time I was sixteen I was well indoctrinated into this theory."[2]

Although her father was a prominent lawyer, she showed independence by becoming an usherette in a cinema, a waitress, a tutor and a factory worker to pay her university fees before winning a popularity contest that entitled her to a trip to Europe.

In 1935, as a student at the University of Washington, Farmer won a subscription contest for the leftist newspaper The Voice of Action. First prize was a trip to the Soviet Union, which she took despite her mother's strong objections, in order to see the pioneering Moscow Art Theatre. These two incidents fostered speculations that Farmer was both an atheist and a Communist.

Farmer studied drama at the University of Washington. During the 1930s, its drama department productions were considered citywide cultural events and attended accordingly. While there she starred in plays including Helen of Troy, Everyman and Uncle Vanya. In late 1934, she starred in the school's production of Alien Corn, speaking foreign languages, playing the piano, and receiving rave reviews in what was then the longest-running play in the department's history.

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