Caudill was one of eleven children in the family of Susan and George Caudill of Harlan County, Kentucky.
She moved to Chicago for a job in a publishing house, and she married James Sterling Ayars in 1931. They moved to Urbana, Illinois in 1937 with their two children.
Caudill's first book, Barrie and Daughter (Viking, 1943), came from memories of her childhood in the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. Most of her children's books brought alive the pioneer era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evoking the culture of Appalachia she loved.
(Wikipedia)