Carol Ryrie Brink is the author of over thirty juvenile and adult books, including Newberry Award winning Caddie Woodlawn. Carol was orphaned after her father died in 1900 and her mother committed suicide in 1904, and was raised by her maternal grandmother, Caroline Woodhouse Watkins. She attended the University of Idaho for three years, where she wrote for The Argonaut student newspaper and the Gem of the Mountains yearbook, before transferring to the University of California Berkeley for her senior year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1918, and that same year she married Raymond W. Brink, a young mathematics professor she had met in Moscow, Idaho many years before.

After moving to St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband, Carol's first novel, Anything Can Happen on the River, was published in 1934. Her novel Caddie Woodlawn won the Newberry Medal in 1936. Carol was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Idaho in 1965. Brink Hall, a building on the University of Idaho campus that houses the English department, was named for her shortly after her death. 'Carol Ryrie Brink Nature Park' on the east side of Moscow was dedicated during a centennial celebration of her birth in 1995. Additionally, the children's section of the Moscow Public Library contains the 'Carol Ryrie Brink Reading Room.'