Sylvia Porter entered college wanting to major in English. Her widowed mother's losses in the stock market crash of 1929, however, convinced Porter to reconsider. To understand how that disaster had happened, she soon shifted her focus to economics. Along with her own firm grasp on that sometimes obscure subject, Porter had a remarkable gift for explaining it to others, and in 1935 she became a financial columnist for the New York Post. The popularity of her column eventually led to its syndication, and by 1950 Porter was the country's most widely read investment adviser.

Porter sat for this portrait in 1960 at the behest of Time, whose editors were planning to feature it on the magazine's cover. In the story that ran with the portrait on November 28, 1960, Time noted that Porter's "crystal ball" could be "as cloudy as" any other economic forecaster's. When it came, however, to reducing complex monetary issues "to manageable size," it added, she "has no equal."