Brenda Wallis Smith is the author of A Pennine Childhood, which describes growing up in a village in the North of England during the second quarter of the last century. When she was twenty-three, she married Joe Smith, a farmer's son who had just gained his PhD from Cambridge University. Two weeks later, they sailed into New York Harbor. She lived in Washington, D.C., returned to Cambridge, England, for three years where Joe did research at the Cavendish Laboratory, and they and their two young daughters returned to the U.S., living in two towns in Pennsylvania, and then in Chicago, where Joe became the youngest full professor at the University of Chicago.

Her life contained many trips across and around America, from the California Redwood trees to the deserts of the Southwest, the Pacific Mountains, and the oceans of both West and East Coast, with yearly returns to her home in England. She raised her daughters, all the while casting her gimlet eye on American culture. She wrote for the Chicago Daily News and ran a recording studio for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. She now lives near Boston with her older daughter and family, and returns to her English village every summer.