Kate Douglas Wiggin (nee Smith) was born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1856. She was raised for the most-part
in Maine, which forms a backdrop to much of her fiction.
She moved to California in the 1870s, and became involved
in the "free kindergarten" movement. She opened the Silver
Street Free Kindergarten in San Francisco, the first free
kindergarten in California, and there she worked until
the late 1880s (meantime opening her own training school
for teachers). Her first husband, Samuel Wiggin, died in 1889.
By then famous, she returned to New York and Maine.
She moved in international social circles, lecturing and giving
readings from her work. In 1895 she married for the second time
(to George Riggs).

At her home in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden
Gate and Marin County, she wrote her first book, "The Birds'
Christmas Carol", to raise money for her school.
The book also proved to be her means of entrance into publishing,
translation, and travel in elite circles throughout Europe.
The book was republished many times thereafter, and translated into
several languages. In addition to factual and educational works
(undertaken together with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith)
she also wrote a number of other popular novels in the early
years of the 20th century, including "Rebecca", and "The Story
of Waitstill Baxter" (1913). She died in 1923, on August 23,
at Harrow-on-Hill, England.

Beverly Seaton observed, in "American Women Writers",
that Mrs. Wiggin was "a popular writer who expressed what
her contemporaries themselves thought of as 'real life'"