[2] During his youth, he worked at many odd jobs, including baker, cook, sign painter, sawmill worker,[6] cowboy, mule skinner, logger,[7] ranch hand,[7] and carnival medicine man.

Rounds spent much of the early 1930s visiting publishers in New York City in an attempt to convince editors to give him work as an illustrator.

"[5] Through these persistent efforts to win the attention of publishers, Rounds unintentionally developed a reputation as a gifted storyteller, to the extent that editors eventually advised him to create an artistic opportunity for himself by writing a story collection that he could also illustrate.

In The Blind Colt (1941), he introduced the character of Whitey, a young Montana cowboy, who would eventually appear in eleven books published from 1941 to 1963.

[1] Clues to the appeal of Rounds storytelling were given by Pat Parker in Language Arts magazine: "Rounds draws children, women, men and the ever-present dogs surrounded by space, suggesting frugality and human frailty in a land of awesome size; at the same time he adds subtle, sly, comic touches for real-life atmosphere."

[2] Reviewers continued to praise both his writing and his artistry: his last book, Beavers (1999), was praised by a Horn Book reviewer as "a model of how to convey a wealth of information in just a few clear, well-phrased sentences," and his illustrations were compared to the patient work of a beaver building a dam, seeming "aimless when taken stick by stick or line by line, but wonderfully effective in sum".

[4] The North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inducted him as an honoree in 2002, the year of his death, calling Rounds "the last of the great 'Ring-Tailed Roarers'".