A New Name

Grace Livingston Hill was born on April 16, 1865 to a Presbyterian Minister, Charles and a published author, Marcia, in Wellsville, New York. For her twelfth birthday, Hills Aunt Pansy had one of her stories published in a book of short stories. This was the beginning of Hills career as a writer. In 1886, Hill and her family moved to Winter Park, Florida, where she got a job teaching gymnastics at a local college. She wrote her first real book there, in an effort to raise money for a family vacation to Chautauqua Lake. The book was called Chatauqua Idyl and was published in 1887 by D. Lothrop and Company, the same publisher that printed her first story when she was twelve. Hill was eventually married and began a family, but lost her husband to appendicitis. At this point in her life, her writing was the only means she had to keep food on the table and money in her pockets. In her lifetime, Hill wrote over a hundred books, only two of which were non-fiction. Grace Livingston Hill died in 1947 at the age of 82.