[2]: 267  Eleanor Estes attributes her love of reading, children's literature, and storytelling to her parents' fondness for books and her mother's "inexhaustible supply of songs, stories, and anecdotes, with which she entertained us with while cooking dinner.

[4]: 147 In 1931, Estes won the Caroline M. Hewins scholarship for children's librarians, which allowed her to study at the Pratt Institute library school in New York.

Her best known fictional characters, the Moffats, live in Cranbury, Connecticut, which is Estes’ hometown of West Haven.

[7] The Esteses had one child, Helena, born in Los Angeles in 1948, where Rice Estes was assistant librarian at the University of Southern California.

Estes based the book on an incident from her own childhood, to atone for staying silent when a peer was bullied.

"[14]: 319  Anita Silvey said she possessed a "rare gift for depicting everyday experiences from the fresh perspective of childhood.