[1][2][3] Her father died when she was four years old and the family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, because her maternal great-uncle Charles Todd Quintard lived there.

An early member of the NAACP, she supported the civil rights movement and her trilogy The Plummer Children focused on interracial friendships.

Among the most known were Judy and Chris, The Pink Maple House, Those Plummer Children, and String and the No-Tail Cat,[15] and editions were published in Denmark, England, Germany, Japan and Sweden.

[12] Some of her writing papers are housed at the McCain Library and Archives in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

[16] Both of her daughters, Emily and Mary, became noted writers and her son, James became a librarian, at one time serving as the head of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.