Natalie Zane Moore was born on July 28, 1932, in Dayton, Ohio. Her ancestors on both sides came to North America in the 1600s and two of them, Isaac Zane, the White Eagle of the Wyandottes, and Zebulon Pike, the discoverer of Pike's Peak, were renowned adventurers and explorers. Others among her ancestors founded towns throughout West Virginia and Ohio.

Babbitt's father, Ralph Moore, worked in the field of labor relations, but, due in part to the Great Depression and in part, perhaps, to his wife Genevieve's desire that the family better themselves, he switched jobs frequently throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Babbitt has often emphasized the enormous effect that these moves from city to city had on the formation of her personality and on her later writing. Her stories tend to be about young people who, for one reason or another, are lost or separated...