Hilda van Stockum was born in Rotterdam in 1908. She studied art in Amsterdam and Dublin. She met husband Ervin R. Marlin in Dublin and they were married in 1932. Her first book was "A Day on Skates", published in 1934, the same year as the birth of her first child. "Little Old Bear" was published by Viking Press in 1962. She died in 2006. Obituaries appeared in the New York Times and the New York Sun.