Stella Dallas was perhaps the most excrutiating melodrama on radio, certainly rivaling and some believe surpassing even the Hummerts' tortuous Backstage Wife and Romance of Helen Trent in the pain-per-minute sweepstakes. It was initially billed as "the true-to-life sequel, as written by us, to the world-famous drama of mother love and sacrifice," the "sequel" business an obvious reference to the 1937 Barbara Stanwyck film of the same name. The radio serial, it was suggested, would pick up where the film left off, but both owed their existence to the turn-of-the-century book by Olive Higgins Prouty. Prouty's tale of a gallant-hearted but disadvantaged woman of the world was as relevant to audiences of 1937 as it had been to the earlier generation. On radio, Stella blossomed into middle age: the story was eventually billed as "the later life of Stella Dallas," but the epigraph still summarized in its classic purple simplicity the whole tear-stained run:

And now, Stella Dallas, a continuation on the air of the true-to-life story of mother love and sacrifice, in which Stella Dallas saw her own beloved daughter Laurel marry into wealth and society, and, realizing the difference in their tastes and worlds, went out of Laurel's life....