Edna Tutt was born January 23, 1904 in Everton, Arkansas to David Walker and Britia Marita (McNair) Tutt. She graduated from high school in Arkansas City, Kansas. She received her bachelors from Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa in 1925, majoring in sociology, and her docorate from the University of Kansas in 1931, as well as taking summer courses at the Universities of Iowa and Nebraska in the 1920s. Her academic interests lay in American history, comparative literature, and ancient and medieval European history. In 1923 she married Otto Frovin Frederikson.

Edna Frederikson briefly taught history at Kansas State College before she and her husband moved to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she taught English at Madison College, later James Madison University, from 1932-1941.

After Otto Frederikson retired from his own academic career in 1957, teaching history and social sciences at James Madison University, the couple traveled extensively around the world, visiting almost every country. Otto Frederikson died in 1973.

Edna published a novel, Three Parts Earth, in 1972 and authored the biography John P. St. John, the Father of Constitutional Prohibition based on her doctoral dissertation. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, including the award-winning poem "Epitaph," regarding the death of Mary White, the daughter of William Allen White, and in 1988 published a collection of poetry, Never Tomorrow.

Edna Tutt Frederikson died on February 7, 1998.