Karen Cushman was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 4, 1941, and the future Newbery Medalist was an avid childhood reader from the time she discovered the library. Her formal education through high school— in Chicago and Tarzana, California, where the family moved when Cushman was eleven—came in Catholic schools which she found "more controlled than inspired."

She responded to this rather confined intellectualism with a private fantasy world that found outlets in holding plays with neighborhood friends and mental reveries of traveling the world on her younger brother's homemade scooter. This imaginative realm was enhanced by extensive reading, especially fiction; although she has always had the capacity for sudden intellectual passions such as "the Civil War. . .or. . . the physiology of the brain." This ability for ardently engaged research helps her present finely detailed and authentic historical backgrounds in her young adult fiction...