Marijane Meaker was born on May 27, 1927, in Auburn, New York.

She has written under the pen names of M. J. Meaker, Vin Packer, Ann Aidrich, and since 1972 when she started to write young adult fiction, M. E. Kerr. She received her B. A. in English from the University of Missouri in 1949, whereupon she moved to New York City to work for publisher E. P. Dutton. While working, she continued with her own writing and as a freelance writer, and during the 1950s and 1960s she published twenty-eight adult novels. In 1972, she wrote her first young adult novel, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack. Since then she has become one of the genre's most popular authors because of her ability to write with credibility and humor about human fallibility. In 1983, in her autobiography Me Me Me Me Me: Not a Novel she answered the most often asked...