[1] Born in New York City in 1891, Zaring Stone was the great-great-granddaughter of social reformer Robert Owen.
She started writing in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where she lived with her husband, Ellis Spencer Stone (1889-1956), later a commodore in the U.S. Navy (where he commanded all of the aircraft carriers at the time of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, though none were lost as none was there that day).
[citation needed] Zaring Stone had used the pseudonym of Ethel Vance to write her 1939 anti-Nazi thriller Escape to avoid jeopardizing her daughter, who was living in occupied Europe during the Second World War.
Zaring Stone died on September 29, 1991, at the Mary Elizabeth Nursing Center in Mystic, Connecticut, aged 100.
[1] The Bitter Tea of General Yen, The Cold Journey, Escape, Reprisal and Winter Meeting were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.