Helen Ricker was born in Burlington, Iowa, the daughter of a local teacher and high school principal. She moved with her family to New York City in 1918 and changed her name to "Elswyth Thane". She began working as a freelance writer in the 1920s, and became a newspaper writer and a Hollywood screenwriter. Her first novel, Riders of the Wind, was published in 1926. In 1927, she married 50-year-old naturalist and explorer William Beebe. Her most famous work was her "Williamsburg" series of historical romance fiction, which followed several generations of two families during the American Revolutionary War. She began the series with Dawn's Early Light in 1934, and the last book in the series was Homing, published in 1957. After the death of her husband Beebe in 1962, she continued to live on the couple's farm in Wilmington, Vermont.
