Mary Hays Weik was born in 1898 in Greencastle, Indiana. She graduated with an A.B. from DePauw University and later worked as a journalist, a consultant for social agencies and schools, and as a writer. Mary Hays Weik published her first book, Adventure: A Book of Verse in 1919. She also wrote books on the atomic pollution of the environment and edited an anti-nuclear newsletter. She published her first book for children and young adults, The House at Cherry Hill, in 1938. In 1966, she published The Jazz Man, a story about a young African-American boy living in Harlem. The book, illustrated by her daughter the author/illustrator Ann Grifalconi, was a Newbery Honor Book in 1967. Mary Hays Weik continued to write for children and young adults and in 1972 published a work of historical fiction, A House on Liberty Street, that drew on the life of an ancestor, a German immigrant who came to the United States in the 1840s. Mary Hays Weik died on December 25, 1979 in Manhattan, New York.

Biographical Sources: Something About the Author, vol. 3, pp. 247-248. and vol. 23, p. 233.