Beside children's fiction, she wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and one autobiography published 30 years before her death, Journey Inward.

For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer she was U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1964.

On weekends they camped in the woods near Washington, climbed trees to study owls, gathered edible plants, and made fish hooks from twigs.

She explained, "One was a small girl walking the vast and lonesome tundra outside of Barrow; the other was a magnificent alpha male wolf, leader of a pack in Denali National Park.

[7] She also won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1975 for its German-language edition Julie von den Wölfen, one of only two such double wins (with Scott O'Dell and Island of the Blue Dolphins).

Over the years, George kept one hundred and seventy-three pets, not including dogs and cats, in her home in Chappaqua, New York.