Marjorie Elizabeth Braymer was born on March 21 , 1911, in Chicago, Illinois. From 1930 until 1940 she worked in New York City as an editor and manuscript reader for film companies. She then returned to the Midwest and in 1943 graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in education. In 1944 she returned to New York to obtain a master's degree from Columbia University Teachers College, and from 1960 to 1961 studied at Stanford University.

Braymer has lived in California ever since 1945, when she launched a twodecade teaching career at Sequoia High School in Redwood, California. She also worked as an editor for Addison Wesley Publishing Company in Palo Alto, California, between 1965 and 1967.

Braymer's writing has garnered many awards. She won the Vandewater Poetry Prize at Ohio State University in 1943, and in 1960 was honored with the New York Herald Tribune's Spring Book Festival Honor Book Award for The Walls of Windy...