Jean Fritz has established herself as a writer of historical fiction and biographies for children, two genres which require accuracy, something for which Fritz diligently strives and at which she constantly excels. Many of her noted children's books have been set during the American Revolution. In 1978 she was given the Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award for the "body of her creative writing."

For the first thirteen years of her life Jean Guttery lived in Hankow, China, where she was born to Arthur Minton and Myrtle Chaney Guttery, who had gone to China in 1913 as a newly married couple to serve as YMCA missionaries. As a child Fritz confided in one of her parents that when she grew up she was going to be a writer. She convinced her parents of the seriousness of this intent while in high school when she began to write poetry, short stories, and...