When she was still quite young, however, her parents, Franklin and Sarah Hunt, moved to Newton, in the southeastern corner of the state. The family was living there in 1914, when her father died. Hunt and her mother relocated to her grandparents' farm nearby. She formed a close relationship with her grandfather, who had grown up during the Civil War and had a plentiful stock of stories about his childhood experiences. Hunt later drew on her grandfather's memories as the basis for
Across Five Aprils. She based her second book,
Up a Road Slowly, on her own experiences.
Hunt began her career not as a writer but as a schoolteacher. For fifteen years, from 1930 until 1945, she served as a teacher in French and English in the school system of Oak Park, IL, a suburb of Chicago. She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1939, and went on to obtain a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1946. Hunt taught psychology at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion for the next four years before returning to Illinois.
