Elizabeth Janet Gray was born on October 6, 1902, in Philadelphia, to a Scottish father and a Quaker mother whose family had preceded William Penn to America. From both sides came a rich tradition of song and story, and Gray's writings reflect a devotion to history. She attended the Germantown Friends School and began her literary career with a story published in the Young Churchman. She earned two dollars for the work.

Entering Bryn Mawr College before she was seventeen, Gray completed college by the age of twenty and spent a year tutoring, writing short stories, and receiving rejection slips. She obtained a degree in library science from the Drexel Institute, but soon realized that her life's work lay in writing books.

In 1929 Gray married Morgan Vining, an administrator at the University of North Carolina, and she combined housekeeping with writing and teaching. Meggy Macintosh and...