Two time Newbery Medal winner Lois Lowry was born March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father, Major Robert E. Hammersberg, was a dentist serving in the same army hospital where Lois was born. Lois's mother, Katherine, was a schoolteacher. Lois has an older sister, Helen, and a younger brother, Jon.

In 1940, the Army moved the Hammersbergs to New York, and in 1942, after the outbreak of WWII, Lois's father was posted to the Pacific theater. Lois's mother then moved Lois and her sister to Amish Country in Pennsylvania to live near her mother's family. This early, prolonged separation from her beloved father and the very close relationships that it engendered between Lois, her mother, and her two siblings strongly influenced many of the books that she would later write.

Jealous of her older sister's newly learned skill and fascinated by the relationship be tween letters and...