  We study the possibility of extended inflation in the effective theory of
gravity from strings compactified to four dimensions and find that it strongly
depends on the mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We consider a general class
of string--inspired models which are good candidates for successful extended
inflation. In particular, the $\omega$--problem of ordinary extended inflation
is automatically solved by the production of only very small bubbles until the
end of inflation. We find that the inflaton field could belong either to the
untwisted or to the twisted massless sectors of the string spectrum, depending
on the supersymmetry breaking superpotential.
