Cornelia Meigs was born at Rock Island, Illinois, in 1884. She grew up in a family where storytelling was second nature. In a paper in this collection she says, "Since my father's kindred had been, in long succession, officers in the army and navy and my mother's father and mother had been pioneers from Vermont to Illinois, stories current in our house made the settlement of the Middle West, the War of 1812, the brush with the Barbary pirates, and the Civil War as familiar as any events within the century."

She received a public school education before going to Bryn Mawr College, where she received her A.B. degree in 1908. She taught English in Davenport, Iowa, at St. Katherine's School until 1913. She taught in the English Department at Bryn Mawr from 1932 to 1950.

Meigs published her first book for children, The Kingdom of the Winding Road, in 1915. She wrote over thirty books for children. She sometimes wrote under the pseudonym of Adair Aldon. In 1927 she won the Beacon Hill Bookshelf Prize with The Trade Wind and in 1934 she won the Newberry Medal for Invincible Louisa, a biography of Loisa May Alcott, becoming the first Iowan to win that honor. In 1953 A Critical History of Children's Literature was published, for which Meigs served as editor, and she wrote some of the pieces as well. In addition to writing books for young people, Meigs also wrote short stories for magazines. She died in 1973.