Kate DiCamillo was born March 25, 1964, in Merion, Pennsylvania. At the age of five, her family moved to Florida because her doctors felt the warm climate might cure her chronic pneumonia. There, DiCamillo read such books as A Cricket in Times Square, The Twenty-One Balloons, The Secret Garden, The Yearling, Ribsy, Somebody Else's Shoes, and all the Louisa May Alcott books. She also lists authors Carson McCullers and Harper Lee as her heroes.

DiCamillo earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Florida, and after returning to the North to live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she began working full time in a used bookstore. She received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers in 1998, and during a very cold winter in Minnesota, DiCamillo says she began to get terribly homesick for Florida.

In addition, the apartment building where she lived did not allow...