She gathered the folktales, stories, and archaic dialects of the rural communities she visited in her home state of Georgia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and wove them into her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934, and the French literary award, the Prix Femina Americain in 1935.

Miller's story about the struggles of nineteenth-century south Georgia pioneers found a new readership in 1993 when Lamb in His Bosom was reprinted, one year after her death.

During her early years of marriage, while raising her children and performing her domestic duties, Miller wrote short stories, an activity first begun in high school.

[6] Her initial work was done when "returning to Baxley, she would go to Barnes Drugstore, order a Coca-Cola, and write down the stories she had heard on the day's trip";[7] then she would slowly flesh out her novel in the quiet hours of the evening on her kitchen table.

[2][3][5] While stories from the backwoods became part of the fabric of her novel, Miller also drew upon the inspiring tales of the pioneer women in her own family history.

During this search, she met former Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Peterkin, who read and then forwarded Miller's manuscript for Lamb in His Bosom to her own agent.

[1][10] The newfound celebrity, that both complimented and burdened the new Pulitzer Prize winner, proved stressful for the rural Georgia school superintendent and his wife.

The obligations and attention imposed upon Caroline were incompatible with the quiet, simple, existence that she and William had enjoyed prior to her fame.

She moved with him to the town of Waynesville in North Carolina, where Caroline worked in the family business while continuing to write short stories and articles for newspapers and magazines, such as Pictorial Review and Ladies' Home Journal.

Although constructed along the lines of her earlier work, set in rural Georgia, the new novel had a romantic storyline which was criticized as being awkward and unrealistic.

[1][8] Her first novel regained popularity a year after her death when Peachtree Publishers (Atlanta) reprinted Lamb in His Bosom with a new afterword from historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.