Date of birth may be 1924 — unclear from obituary. Born Arona Lipman and a native of Boston, she was married to Warren J. McHugh, a folk artist who died in 1986. They lived in New York and she wrote her first book in Sag Harbor. She was a 1950 graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She earned a master's degree in library science at Columbia University in 1951.