Esther Forbes was born in Westborough, Massachusetts. In 1898 she moved with her family to Worcester, Massachusetts, where she was educated at the Bancroft School. Although vision problems impaired her studies, she thrived on creative writing assignments. In 1912, she graduated from Bradford Junior Academy. In 1918, she moved to Boston and worked as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company. In 1926, her first novel, Oh Genteel Lady!, was published. That same year, she married, but was divorced in 1933.
Over the course of her career Forbes published 11 books, including the biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the historical novel Johnny Tremain (1943), which won the 1944 Newbery Medal. She died in 1967 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
